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ESSAYS, 


B Y 



EMERSON. 


EIRST SERIES. 


BOSTON: 

JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

LATE TIOKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 

1871 . 


TS iuo? 
.A* 

I?15 



v 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1847, by 
Jambs Monroe and Company, 

in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 


486555 

AUG 1 3 1942 




CONTENTS 


ESSAY. I. 

Paga 

HISTORY, 1 

ESSAY n. 

SELF-RELIANCE, 37 

ESSAY III. 

COMPENSATION, 81 

ESSAY IV. 

SPIRITUAL LAWS, 115 

ESSAY V. 

LOVE, 161 

ESSAY VI. 

FRIENDSHIP, . ... 173 


VI 


CONTENTS. 


ESSAY VII. 

Pagfl 

PRUDENCE 199 

ESSAY VIII. 

HEROISM, 221 

ESSAY IX. 

THE OVER-SOUL, , 241 

ESSAY X. 

CIRCLES, . 271 

ESSAY XI. 

INTELLECT, 293 

ESSAY XII. 

...... . 


315 


HISTORY 


There is no great and no small 
To the Soul that nmketh all : 

-Ana where it enrneth, all things are ; 
And it cometh everywhere. 


I 


1 am owner of the sphere, 

Of me seven stars and the solar rear, 

Of Cstsar's hand, and Plato's bra*n. 

Of Lord Christ s heart, and iShakspeare’s strain. 


ESSAY I 


HISTORY. 


— ♦— 

There is one mind common to all individual men 
Eveiy man is an inlet to the same and to all of the 
same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason 
is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato 
has thought, he may think ; what a saint has felt, he 
may feel ; what at any time has befallen any man, 
he can understand. Who hath access to this univer- 
sal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for 
this is the only and sovereign agent. 

Of the works of this mind history is the record. 
Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. 
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. 
Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes 
forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, 
every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in 
appropiiate events. But the thought is always prior 
to the fact , all the facts of history preexist in the 
m.nd as laws. Each law in turn is made by circum- 


ESSAY I. 


stances predominant, and the limits of nature give 
power to but one at a time. A man is the whole 
encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand 
forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, 
Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the 
first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, em- 
pire, republic, democracy, are merely the applica- 
tion of his manifold spirit to the manifold world. 

This human mind wrote history, and this must 
read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. 
If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be 
explained from individual experience. There is a 
relation between the hours of our life and the cen- 
turies of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from 
the great repositories of nature, as the light on my 
book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles 
distant, as the poise of my body depends on the 
equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so 
the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the 
ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind 
each individual man is one more incarnation. All 
ts properties consist in him. Each new fact in his 
private experience flashes a light on what great 
bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life 
refer to national crises. Every revolution was first 
a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same 
thojght occurs to another man, it is the key to that 
era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and 


HISTORY. 


5 


when it shall bo a private opinion again, it will so ve 
the problem of the age. The fact narrated must 
correspond to something in me to be credible or in- 
telligible. We as we read must become Greeks, 
Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and execu- 
tioner, must fasten these images to some reality in 
our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing right 
ly What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as 
much an illustration of the mind’s powers and depra- 
vations as what has befallen us. Each new law and 
political movement has meaning for you. Stand be- 
fore each of its tablets and say, c Under this mask 
did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ This remedies 
the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. 
This throws our actions into perspective : and as 
crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot 
lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, 
so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant 
persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline. 

It is the universal nature which gives worth to par 
licular men and things. Human life as containing 
this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it 
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence 
their ultimate reason ; all express more or less dis- 
tinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable es- 
sence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great 
spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it 
with swords and laws, and wide and complex combi- 


6 


liSSAV I. 


nations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is 
the light of all our day, the claim of claims ; the 
plea for education, for justice, for charity, the foun- 
dation of friendship and love, and of the heroism and 
grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. It 
is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as su- 
perior beings. Universal history, the poets, the ro- 
mancers, do not in their stateliest pictures — in the 
sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of 
will or of genius — anywhere lose our ear, anywhere 
make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better 
men ; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes 
we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says 
of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the 
corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize 
in the great moments of history, in the great dis- 
coveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities 
of men; — because there .aw was enacted, the sea 
was searched, the land was found, or the blow was 
struck for us , as we ourselves in that place would 
have done or applauded. 

We have the same interest in condition and char- 
acter. We honor the rich, because they have ex- 
ternally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel 
to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is 
said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modem 
essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, de- 
scribes his unattained but attainable self. All liter* 


HISTORY. 


7 


Rture writes the character of the wise man. Books, 
monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in 
which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The 
silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him, 
and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by per- 
sonal allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never 
needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in dis- 
course. He hears the commendation, not of him- 
self, but more sweet, of that character he seeks, in 
every word that is said concerning character, yea, 
further, in every fact and circumstance, — in the run- 
ning river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, 
homage tendered, love flow’s from mute nature, from 
the mountains and the lights of the firmament. 

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and 
night, let us use in broad day. The student is to 
read history actively and not passively ; to esteem 
his own life the text, and books the commentary. 
Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter ora- 
cles, as never to those who do not respect them- 
selves. I have no expectation that any man will read 
history aright, who thinks that what was done in a 
remote age, by men whose names have resounded 
far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to- 
day. 

The world exists for the education of each man. 
There is no age or state of society or mode of ac- 
tion in history, to which there is not somewhat cor- 


8 


ESSAY I. 


responding m his life. Every thing tends in a won- 
derful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own 
virtue to him. He should see that be can live all 
history in bis own person. He must sit solidly at 
home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings 
or empires, but know that be is greater than all 
the geography and all the government of the world ; 
lie must transfer the point of view from which his- 
tory is commonly read, from Rome and Athens 
and London to himself, and not deny his conviction 
that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have 
any thing to say to him, he will try the case ; if not, 
let them for ever be silent He must attain and 
maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their se- 
cret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The 
instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays 
itself in the use we make of the signal narrations 
of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the 
solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no 
fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, 
Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are pass- 
ing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, 
the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thence- 
forward to all nations. Who cares what the fact 
was; when we have made a constellation of it to 
ban* in heaven an immortal sign ? London and Paris 
and New York must go the same way. “ What is 
History,” said Napoleon, u but a fable agreed up- 


HISTORY. 


9 


on ?” This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, 
Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, 
Court, and Commerce, as with so many flowers and 
wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make 
more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I 
can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, 
— the genius and creative principle of each and of 
aL eras in my own mind. 

We are always coming up with the emphatic 
facts of history in our private experience, and 
verifying them here. All history becomes subjec- 
tive ; in other words, there is properly no history ; 
only biography. Every mind must know the whole 
lesson for itself, — must go over the whole ground. 
What it does not see, what it does not live, it will 
not know. What the former age has epitomized in- 
to a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it 
will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means 
of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it 
will demand and find compensation for that loss by 
doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many 
things in astronomy which had long been known. 
The better for him. 

History must be this or it is nothing. Eve:y law 
which the state enacts indicates a fact in human na- 
ture ; that is all. We must in ourselves see the 
necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could 
uul must be. So stand before every public and 


10 


ESSAV I. 


private work ; before an oration of Burke, before a 
victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir 
Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, 
before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hang 
ing of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the An- 
imal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We 
assume that we under like influence should be alike 
affected, and should achieve the like ; and we aim to 
master intellectually the steps, and reach the same 
height or the same degradation, that our fellow, our 
proxy, has done. 

All inquiry into antiquity, — all curiosity respect- 
ing the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, 
the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, — is the desire 
to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There 
or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and 
the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mum- 
my-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the 
end of the difference between the monstrous work 
and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in gen- 
eral and in detail, that it was made by such a person 
as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which 
be himself should also have worked, the problem 
is solved ; his thought lives along the whole line 
of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes 
through them all with satisfaction, and they live again 
to the mind, or are now. 

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, 


HISTORY. 


11 


and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we 
find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to 
the history of its production. We put ourselves 
into the place and state of the builder. We re- 
member the forest-dwellers, the first temples, the 
adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it 
as the wealth of the nation increased ; the value 
which is given to wood by carving led to the carv- 
ing over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. 
When we have gone through this process, and add- 
ed thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, 
its processions, its Saints’ days and image-worship, 
we have, as it were, been the man that made the min- 
ster ; we have seen how it could and must be. We 
have the sufficient reason. 

The difference between men is in their principle 
of association. Some men classify objects by color 
and size and other accidents of appearance ; others 
by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and 
effect. The progress of the intellect is to the 
clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface dif- 
ferences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the 
saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events 
profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the 
eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circurn 
stance. Every chemical substance, every plant, 
every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of 
cause, the variety of appearance. 


12 


ESSAY x. 


Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-cre« 
aling nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why 
should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few 
forms ? Why should we make account of time, or 
of magnitude, or of figure ? The soul knows them 
not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play 
with them as a young child plays with graybeards and 
in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and, 
far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting 
from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite di- 
ameters. Genius watches the monad through all his 
masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. 
Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpil- 
lar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant 
individual ; through countless individuals, the fixed 
species ; through many species, the genus ; through 
all genera, the steadfast type ; through all the king- 
doms of organized life, the eternal unity. Nature is a 
mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. 
She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a 
poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through 
the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit 
bends all things to its own will. The adamant 
streams into soft but precise form before it, and, 
whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed 
again. Nothing is so fleeting as form ; yet never 
does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the 
remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of ser- 


II STORY. 


13 


ntude in the lower races ; yet in him they enhance 
his nobleness and grace ; as Io, in iEsch/lus, trans- 
formed to a cow, offends the imagination ; but how 
changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris- 
Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the meta- 
morphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid 
ornament of her brows ! 

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the 
diversity equally obvious. There is at the surface 
infinite variety of things ; at the centre there is sim- 
plicity of cause. How many are the acts of one 
man in which we recognize the same character ! 
Observe the sources of our information in respect to 
ihe Greek genius. We have the civil history of that 
neople, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and 
Plutarch have given it ; a very sufficient account of 
what manner of persons they were, and what they 
did. We have the same national mind expressed for 
us again in their literature , in epic and lyric poems, 
drama, and philosophy ; a very complete form. 
Then we have it once more in their architecture , a 
beauty as of temperance itself, limited to tic straight 
line and the square, — a budded geometry. Then 
we have it once again in sculpture , the “ tongue on 
the balance of expression,” a multitude of forms in 
the utmost freedom of action, and never transgressing 
the ideal serenity ; like votaries performing some 
religious dance before the gods, and. though in con- 


14 


ESSAY I. 


vulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break 
the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the 
genius of one remarkable people, we have a fourfold 
representation : and to the senses what more unlike 
than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peri 
style of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Pho- 
cion ? 

Every one must have observed faces aid forms 
which, without an)' resembling feature, make a like 
impression on the beholder. A particular picture or 
copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of 
images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as 
some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance 
is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out 
of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an 
endless combination and repetition of a very few 
laws. She hums the old well-known air through 
innumerable variations. 

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness through- 
out her works ; and delights in startling us with re- 
semblances in the most unexpected quarters. I 
have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest, 
which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain 
summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested the 
strata of the rock. There are men whose manners 
have the same essential splendor as the simple and 
awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and 
the remains of the earliest Greek art And there 


HISTORY. 


15 


are compositions of the same strain to be found m 
the books of all ages. What is Guido’s Rospigliosi 
Aurora but a morning thought, as the horses in it are 
only a morning cloud. If any one will but take 
pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is 
equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those 
to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the 
chain of affinity. 

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree 
without in some sort becoming a tree ; or draw a 
child by studying the outlines of its form merely, — 
but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, 
the painter enters into his nature, and can then draw 
him at will in every attitude. So Roos u entered 
into the inmost nature of a sheep.” I knew a 
draughtsman employed- in a public survey, who found 
that he could not sketch the rocks until their geologi- 
cal structure was first explained to him. In a certain 
state of thought is the common origin of very diverse 
works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is iden- 
tical. By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily 
by a painful acquisition of many manual skills, the 
artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a 
given activity. 

It has been said, that “ common souls pay with 
• what they do ; nobler souls with that which they 
are.” And why ? Because a profound nature 
awakens in us by its actions and words, by it9 


ESSAY 


It) 

very looks and manners, tne same power and beau- 
ty that a gallery of sculpture, or of pictures, ad- 
dresses. 

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of 
literature, must be explained from individual history, 
or must remain words. There is nothing but is 
related to us, nothing that does not interest us, — 
kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the roots 
of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the 
Dome of St. Peter’s are lame copies after a divine 
model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counter- 
part of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true 
poem is the poet’s mind ; the true ship is the ship- 
builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we 
should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril 
of his work ; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell 
preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. The 
whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A 
man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with 
all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add. 

The trivial experience of every day is always veri- 
fying some old prediction to us, and converting into 
things the words and signs which we had heard and 
seen without heed. A lady, with whom I was riding 
in the forest, said to me, that the woods always 
seemed to her to wait , as if the genii who inhabit * 
them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has 
passed onward : a thought which poetry has cele- 


HISTORY. 


17 


orated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on 
the approach of human feet. The man who has seen 
the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight 
has been present like an archangel at the creation of 
light and of the world. I remember one summer 
day, in the fields, my companion pointed out to me a 
broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile 
parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form 
of a cherub as painted over churches, — a round 
block in the centre, which it was easy to animate 
with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by 
wide-stretched symmetrical wings. What appears 
once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it w T as 
undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. 
I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning 
which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew 
from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the 
hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the 
sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea 
of the common architectural scroll to abut a tower. 

By surrounding ourselves with the original circum- 
stances, we invent anew the orders and the ornaments 
of architecture, as we see how each people merely 
decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple 
preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in 
which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is 
plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian 
temples still betray the mounds and subterranean 
2 


18 


ESSAY 1. 


houses of their forefathers. <c The custom of making 
houses and tombs in the living rock,” says Heeren, 
in his Researches on the Ethiopians, “ determined 
very naturally the principal character of the Nubian 
Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it 
assumed. In these caverns, already prepared by 
nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge 
shapes and masses, so that, when art came to the as- 
sistance of nature, it could not move on a small scr.-e 
without degrading itself. What would statues of the 
usual size, or neat porches and wings, have been, as- 
sociated with those gigantic halls before which only 
Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean on the pillars 
of the interior ? ” 

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude 
adaptation of the forest trees with all their boughs 
to a festal or solemn arcade, as the bands about the 
cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied 
them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine 
woods, without being struck with the architectural 
appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when 
the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch 
of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon 
one will see as readily the origin of the stained 
glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are 
adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen 
through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. 
Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of 


HISTORY. 


19 


Oxford and the English cathedrals, without feeling 
that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, 
and that his chisel, his saw, and plane still repro 
duced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, 
oak, pine, fir, and spruce. 

Tiie Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone 
subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. 
The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flow- 
er, with the lightness and delicate finish, as well as 
the aerial proportions and perspective, of vegetable 
beauty. 

In like manner, all public facts are to be individ- 
ualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then 
at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biogra- 
phy deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in 
the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the 
stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian 
court in its magnificent era never gave over the no- 
madism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from 
Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in 
summer, and to Babylon for the winter. 

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism 
and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The 
geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a no- 
madic life. But the nomads were the terror of all 
those whom the soil, or the advantages of a market, 
had induced to build towns. Agriculture, therefore, 
was a religious injunction, because of the perils ol 


20 


ESSAY I. 


the state from nomadism. Anc in these late and 
civil countries of England and America, these pro- 
pensities still fight out the old battle in the nation 
and in the individual. The nomads of Africa were 
constrained to wander by the attacks of the gad- 
fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels 
the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season, and to 
drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The 
nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month to 
month. In America and Europe, the nomadism is 
of trade and curiosity ; a progress, certainly, from 
the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania 
of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical 
religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws 
and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond, 
were the check on the old rovers ; and the cumula- 
tive values of long residence are the restraints on the 
itineracy of the present day. The antagonism oi the 
two tendencies is not less active in individuals, as 
the love of adventure or the love of repose happens 
to predominate. A man of rude health and flowing 
spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication, lives in 
his wagon, and roams through all latitudes as easily as 
a Calinuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, 
he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, 
and associates as happily, as oeside his own chim- 
neys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in 
tne increased range of his faculties of observation, 


HISTORT. 


21 


which yield him points of interest wherever fresh 
objects meet hi*/ eyes. The pastoral nations were 
needy «tnd hu r>r r to desperation ; and this intellect- 
ual nomadism, n its excess, bankrupts the mind, 
through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of 
objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, 
is that continence or content which finds all the ele- 
ments of life in its own soil ; and which has its own 
perils of monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated 
by foreign infusions. 

Every thing the individual sees without him cor- 
responds to his states of mind, and every thing is in 
turn intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads 
him into the truth to which that fact or series be- 
longs. 

The primeval world, — the Fore-World, as the 
Germans say, — - 1 can dive to it in myself as well as 
grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, 
libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined 
villas. 

What is the foundation of that interest all men 
feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all 
its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down 
to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, 
four or five centuries later ? What but this, that 
every man passes personally through a Grecian pe- 
riod. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily 
nature, the perfection of the senses, — of the spirit- 


22 


ESSAY I. 


ual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. Tn 
it existed those human forms which supplied the 
sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and 
Jove ; not like the forms abounding in the streets of 
modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of 
features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, 
and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so 
formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to 
squint, and take furtive glances on this side and on 
that, but they must turn the whole head. The man- 
ners of that period are plain and fierce. The rever- 
ence exhibited is for personal qualities, courage, ad- 
dress, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, a 
loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are 
not known. A sparse population and want make 
every man his own valet, cook, butcher, and soldier, 
and the habit of supplying his own needs educates 
the body to wonderful performances. Such are the 
Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far dif- 
ferent is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and 
his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. 
“ After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in 
Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay 
miserably on the ground covered with it. But Xeno- 
phon arose naked, and, taking an axe, began to split 
wood ; whereupon others rose and did .lie like.” 
Throughout his army exists a boundless liberty of 
speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle 


niSTORY. 


23 


with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon 
is as sharp-tongued as any, and sharper-tongued than 
most, and so gives as good as he gets. Who does 
not see that this is a gang of great boys, with such a 
code of honor and such lax discipline as great boys 
have ? 

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and in- 
deed of all the old literature, is, that the persons speak 
simply, — speak as persons who have great good 
sense without knowing it, before yet the reflective 
habit has become the predominant habit of the mind. 
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of 
the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not 
reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their 
health, with the finest physical organization in the 
world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace 
of children. They made vases, tragedies, and stat- 
ues, such as healthy senses should, — that is, in good 
taste. Such things have continued to be made in all 
ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique ex- 
ists ; but, as a class, from their superior organization, 
they have surpassed all. They combine the energy 
of manhood with the engaging unconsciousness of 
childhood. The attraction of these manners is that 
they belong to man, and are known to every man in 
7irtue of his being once a child ; besides that there 
are always individuals who retain these characteris- 
tics. A person of childlike genius and inborn energy 


24 


ESSAY i. 


is still a Greek, and revives our love o' the Muse of 
Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoc 
tetes. In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to 
the stars, rocks, mountains, and waves, I feel time 
passing away as an ebbing- sea. I feel the eternity of 
man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had, 
it seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and 
moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they 
meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between 
Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic 
schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a 
thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, — when 
a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time 
is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a 
perception, that our two souls are tinged with the 
same hue, and do, as it were, run into one, why 
should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I 
count Egyptian years ? 

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his 
own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime ad- 
venture and circumnavigation by quite parallel mini- 
ature experiences of his own. To the sacred history 
of the world, he has the same key. When the voice 
of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely 
echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of 
his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the 
confusion of tradition and the caricature of institu- 
tions. 


HISTORY. 


25 


Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, 
who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that 
men of Cod have, from time to time, walked among 
men and made their commission felt in the heart and 
soul of the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently, 
the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the 
divine afflatus. 

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. 
They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him 
with themselves. As they come to revere their in- 
tuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety ex- 
plains every fact, every word. 

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zo- 
roaster,' of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate them- 
selves in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity in 
them. They are mine as much as theirs. 

I have seen the first monks and anchorets without 
crossing seas or centuries. More than once some 
individual has appeared to me with such negligence 
of labor and such commanding contemplation, a 
haughty beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as 
made good to the nineteenth century Simeon the 
Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins. 

The priestcraft o'’ the East and West, of the 
Mngian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in 
the individual’s private life. The cramping influence 
of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his 
spirits and courage, pavalyzing the understanding, and 


26 


ESSAY I. 


that without producing indignation, but only fear and 
obedience, and even much sympathy with the tyran 
ny, — is a familiar fact explained to the child wher, 
lie becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppres- 
sor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over 
by those names and words and forms, of whose in- 
fluence he was merely the organ to the youth. The 
fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and 
how the Pyramids were built, better than the discov- 
ery by Champollion of the names of all the work- 
men and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria 
and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself 
has laid the courses. 

Again, in that protest which each considerate per- 
son makes against the superstition of his times, he 
repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and 
in the search after truth finds like them new perils to 
virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed 
to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licen- 
tiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How 
many times in the history of the world has the Lu- 
ther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in 
h’s own household ! u Doctor, ” said his wife to 
Martin Luther, one day, u how is it that, whilst sub- 
ject to papacy, we prayed so often and with such 
fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness 
and very seldom ? ” 

The advancing man discovers how deep a proper 


HISTORY. 


27 


ty he has in literature, — in all fable as well as in all 
history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow 
who described strange and impossible situations, but 
that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true 
for one and true for all. His own secret biography 
he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dot- 
ted down before he was born. One after another 
he comes up in his private adventures with every 
fable of iEsop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of 
Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with his own 
head and hands. 

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper 
creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, 
are universal verities. What a range of meanings 
and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Pro- 
metheus ! Beside its primary value as the first chap- 
ter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly 
veiling authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic 
arts, and the migration of colonies,) it gives the his- 
tory of religion with some closeness to the faith of lat- 
er ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythol- 
ogy. He is the friend of man ; stands between the 
unjust “justice ” of the Eternal Father and the race 
of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their ac- 
count. But where it departs from the Calvinistic 
Christianity, and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, 
it represents a state of mind which readily appears 
wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in a crude, 


28 


ESSAY I. 


objective form, and which seems the self-defence of 
man against this untruth, namely, a discontent with 
the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that 
the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would 
steal, if it could, the fire of the Creator, and live 
apart from him, and independent of him. The Pro- 
metheus Vmctus is the romance of skepticism. Not 
less true to all time are the details of that stately ap- 
ologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said 
the poets. When the gods come among men, they 
are not known. Jesus was not ; Socrates and Shak- 
speare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the 
gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his 
mother earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the 
broken giant, and, in all his weakness, both his body 
and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversa- 
tion with nature. The power of music, the power 
of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to sol- 
id nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The phi- 
losophical perception of identity through endless mu- 
tations of form makes him know the Proteus. What 
else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept 
last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? 
And what see I on any side but the transmigrations 
of Proteus ? I can symbolize my thought by using 
the name of any creature, of any fact, because every 
creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but 
a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impos- 


HISTORY. 


29 


sibiiity of drinking the waters of thought which are 
always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. 
The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it 
were ; but men and women are only half human. 
Every animal of the barn-yard, the field, and the for- 
est, of the earth and of the waters that are under 
the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave 
the print of its features and form in some one or oth- 
er of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah ! 
brother, stop the ebb of thy soul, — ebbing downward 
into the forms into whose habits thou hast now for 
many years slid. As near and proper to us is also 
that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in 
the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If 
the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. 
If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. 
What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts 
or events ! In splendid variety these changes come, 
all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men 
who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts 
or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber 
them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of rou- 
tine the men of sense , in whom a literal obedience to 
fact-5 has extinguished every spark of that light by 
wnieh man is truly man. But if the man is true to 
his belter instincts or sentiments, and refuses the do- 
minion of facts, as one that comes of a highe r race, 
remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then 


30 


ESSAY I. 


the facts fall aptly and supple into their places ; they 
know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies 
him. 

See in Goethe’s Helena the same desire that ev- 
ery word should be a thing. These figures, he 
would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Hel- 
en, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a spe- 
cific influence on the mind. So far then are they 
eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olym- 
piad. Much revolving them, he writes out freely 
his humor, and gives them body to his own imagi- 
nation. And although that poem be as vague and 
fantastic as a dream, et is it much more attractive 
than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same 
author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful 
relief to the mind from the routine of customary 
images, — aw r akens the reader’s invention and fancy 
by the wild freedom of the design, and by the un- 
ceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise. 

The universal nature, too strong for the petty 
nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes 
through his hand ; so that when he seems to vent 
a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an 
exact allegory. Hence Plato said that <c poets 
utter great and wise things which they do not them- 
selves understand.” All the fictions of the Middle 
Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic ex- 
pression of that which in grave earnest the mind of 


HISTORY. 


31 


that period toiled to achieve. Magic, and all that is 
ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers 
of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword ot 
sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of 
using the secret virtues of minerals, of understand- 
ing the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the 
mind in a right direction. The preternatural prow- 
ess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the 
like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit 
“ to bend the shows of things to the desires of the 
mind.” 

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and 
a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and 
fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of 
the Boy and the Mantle, even a mature reader may 
be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the 
triumph of the gentle Genelas ; and, indeed, all the 
postulates of elfin annals, — that the fairies do not 
like to be named ; that their gifts are capricious and 
not to be trusted ; that who seeks a treasure must 
not speak ; and the like, — I find true in Concord, 
however they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne. 

Is it otherwise in the newest romance ? I read 
the Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton 
is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Cas- 
tle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign 
mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest 
industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that would 


32 


ESSAY I. 


toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the un- 
just and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for 
fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable 
to calamity in this world. 

But along with the civil and metaphysical history 
of man, another history goes daily forward, — that 
of the external world, — in which he is not less 
strictly implicated. He is the compend of time ; 
he is also the correlative of nature. His power 
consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the 
fact that his life is intertwined with the whole chain 
of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the 
public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, 
south, east, west, to the centre of every province of 
the empire, making each market-town of Persia, 
Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the 
capital : so out of the human heart go, as it were, 
highways to the heart of every object in nature, to 
reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a 
bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower 
and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to na- 
tures out of him, and predict the world he is to in- 
habit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water 
exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presup- 
pose air. He cannot live without a world. Put 
Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find 
no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to 


HISTORY. 


33 


play for, and he would beat the air and appear stu- 
pid. Transport him to large countries, dense pop- 
ulation, complex interests, and antagonist power, 
and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded, 
that is, by such a profile and outline, is not the vir- 
tual Napoleon. This is but Talbot’s shadow ; 

“ His substance is not here . 

For what you see is but the smallest part 
And least proportion of humanity; 

But were the whole frame here, 

It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch, 

Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.” 

Henry VI. 

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. 
Newton and Laplace need myriads of ages and thick- 
strewn celestial areas. One may say a gravitating 
solar system is aiready prophesied in the nature of 
Newton’s mind. Not less does the brain of Davy 
or of Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring the 
affinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate the 
laws of organization. Does not the eye of the hu- 
man embryo predict the light ? the ear of Handel 
predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound ? Do not 
the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, 
Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable 
texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and 
wood ? Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden 
child predict the refinements and decorations of civil 
society ? Here also we are reminded of the action 
3 


34 


ESSAY I. 


of man on man. A mind might ponder its thought 
foi ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the 
passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows 
himself before he has been thrilled with indignation 
at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or 
has shared the throb of thousands in a national exul- 
tation or alarm ? No man can antedate his experi- 
ence, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object 
shall unlock, any more than he can draw to-day the 
face of a person whom he shall see to-morrow for 
the first time. 

I will not now go behind the general statement to 
explore the reason of this correspondency. Let it 
suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, 
that the mind is One, and that nature is its correla- 
tive, history is to be read and written. 

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and 
reproduce its treasures for each pupil. He, too, 
shall pass through the whole cycle of experience. 
He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature. 
History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall 
walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You 
shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue 
of the volumes you have read. You shall make me 
feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be 
the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets 
have described that goddess, in a robe painted all 
over with wonderful events and experiences; — his 


HISTORY. 


35 


own form and features by their exalted intelligence 
shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the 
Fore world ; in his childhood the Age of Gold ; the 
Apples of Knowledge ; the Argonautic Expedition ; 
the calling of Abraham ; the building of the Temple ; 
the Advent of Christ ; Dark Ages ; the Revival of 
Letters ; the Reformation ; the discovery of new 
lands ; the opening of new sciences, and new regions 
in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring 
with him into humble cottages the blessing of the 
morning stars and all the recorded benefits of heaven 
and earth. 

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim ? 
Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use 
of pretending to know what we know not ? But it 
is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly 
state one fact without seeming to belie some other. 
I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the 
rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus 
under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know 
sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds 
of life ? As old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps 
older, — these creatures have kept their counsel be- 
side him, and there is no record of any word or sign 
that has passed from one to the other. What con- 
nection do the books show between the fifty or sixty 
chemical elements, and the historical eras ? Nay, 
what does history yet record of the metaphysical 


ESSAY I. 


annals of man ? What light does it shed on those 
mysteries which we hide under the names Death and 
Immortality ? Yet every history should be written 
in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities 
and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to 
see what a shallow village tale our so-called History 
is. How many times we must say Rome, and 
Paris, and Constantinople ! What does Rome know 
of rat and lizard ? What are Olympiads and Con- 
sulates to these neighbouring systems of being ? 
Nay, what food or experience or succour have they 
for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his 
canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter ? 

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, — 
from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the 
ever new, ever sanative conscience, — if we would 
trulier express our central and wide-related nature, 
instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride 
to which w r e have too long lent our eyes. Already 
that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, 
but the path of science and of letters is not the way 
into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and 
unschooled farmer’s boy, stand nearer to the light by 
which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the 
antiquary. 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


“Ne te quaesiveris extra.” 


u Man is his own star ; and the soul that can 
Render an lionest and a perfect man, 

Commands all light, all influence, all fate; 

Nothin" to him falls early or too lato. 

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.” 

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Horn si Man’s Fortum 


Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
Suckle him with the she-vvolf s teat 
Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
Power and speed be hands and feet. 


ESSAY II. 


SE L F-RE L I AN C E. 


— ♦ ■ 

1 read the other day some verses written by an 
eminent painter which were original and not conven- 
tional. The soul always hears an admonition in such 
lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment 
they instil is of more value than any thought they 
may contain. To believe your own thought, to be- 
lieve that what is true for you in your private heart 
is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your 
latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense ; 
for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — 
and our first thought is rendered back to us by the 
trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the 
voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we 
ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set 
at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what 
men but what they thought. A man should learn to 
detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes 
across his mind from within, more than the lustre of 


40 


ESSAY II. 


the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses 
without notice his thought, because it is his. In 
every work of genius we recognize our own rejected 
thoughts : they come hack to us with a certain alien- 
ated majesty. Great works of art have no more 
affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to 
abide by our spontaneous impression with good-hu- 
mored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of 
voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a 
stranger will' say with masterly good sense precisely 
what we have thought and felt all the time, and we 
shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion 
from another. 

There is a time in every man’s education when he 
arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance ; that 
imitation is suicide ; that he must take himself for 
better, for worse, as his portion ; that though the 
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing 
corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed 
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till 
The power which resides in him is new in nature, 
and none but he knows what that is which he can do, 
nor does he know until he has tried. Not for noth- 
ing one face, one character, one fact, makes much 
impression on him, and another none. This sculp- 
ture in the memory is not without preestablished 
harmony. The eye was placed where one ray 
should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


4] 


We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed 
of that divine idea which each of us represents. It 
may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good 
issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not 
have his work made manifest by cowards. A man 
is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his 
work and done his best ; but what he has said or 
done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a de- 
liverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his 
genius deserts him ; no muse befriends ; no inven- 
tion, no hope. 

Trust thyself : every heart vibrates to that iron 
string. Accept the place the divine providence has 
found for you, the society of your contemporaries, 
the connection of events. Great men have always 
done so, and confided themselves childlike to the 
genius of their age, betraying their perception that 
the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, 
working through their hands, predominating in all 
their being. And we are now men, and must ac- 
cept in the highest mind the same transcendent 
destiny ; and not minors and invalids in a protect- 
ed corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, 
but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying 
the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and 
the Dark. 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, 
in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even 


42 


ESSAY II. 


brutes ! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust 
of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed 
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these 
have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as 
yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, 
we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody : 
all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes 
four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to 
it. So God has armed youth and puberty and man- 
hood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and 
made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be 
put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the 
youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you 
and me. Hark ! in the next room his voice is suffi- 
ciently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to 
speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, 
he will know how to make us seniors very unneces- 
sary. 

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a din- 
ner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or 
say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of 
human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit 
is in the playhouse ; independent, irresponsible, look- 
ing out from his corner on such people and facts as 
pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, 
in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, in- 
teresting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers 
nimself never about consequences, about interests ; 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


43 


ne gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must 
court him : he does not court you. But the man is, 
as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. 
As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, 
he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy 
or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now 
enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. 
All, that he could pass again into his neutrality ! 
Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, 
observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, un- 
bribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be for- 
midable. He would utter opinions on all pass- 
ing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but 
necessaiy, would sink like darts into the ear of men, 
and put them in fear. 

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, 
but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the 
world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against 
the manhood of every one of its members. Socie- 
ty is a joint-stock company, m which the members 
agree, for the better securing of his bread to each 
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of 
the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. \ 
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities 
and creators, but names and customs. 

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. \ 
He who would gather immortal palms must not be 
hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore 


44 


ESSAY II. 


if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the 
integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to your- 
self, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. 1 
remember an answer which when quite young I was 
prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont 
to importune me with the dear old doctrines of tho 
church. On my saying, What have I to do with 
the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from 
within ? my friend suggested, — ;c But these impulses 
may be from below, not from above.” I replied, 
“ They do not seem to me to be such ; out if I am 
the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” 
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. 
Good and bad are but names very readily transfera- 
ble to that or this ; the only right is what is after my 
constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A 
man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposi- 
tion, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but 
he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitu- 
late to badges and names, to large societies and dead 
institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individ- 
ual affects and sways me more than is right. I 
ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth 
in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of 
philanthropy, shall that pass ? If an angry bigot 
assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes 
to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should 
l not say to him, c Go love thy infant; love thy 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


45 


wood-chopper : be good-natured and modest : have 
that grace ; and never varnish your hard, uncharita- 
nlc ambition with this incredible tenderness for black 
folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at 
home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greet- 
ing, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of 
love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — 
else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be 
preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love 
when that pules and whines. I shun father and 
mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls 
me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, 
Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at 
last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. 
Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I 
exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as 
a good man did to -day, of my obligation to put all 
poor men in good situations. Are they my poor ? 
I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge 
the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as 
do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. 
There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual 
affinity T am bought and sold ; for them I will go to 
prison, if need be ; but your miscellaneous popular 
charities ; the education at college of fools ; the 
building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which 
many now stand ; alms to sots ; and the thousand- 
fold Relief Societies ; — though I confess with shame 


46 


ESSAY II. 


I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a 
wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the man- 
hood to withold. ' 

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the ex- 
ception than the rule. There is the man and his 
virtues. Men do what is called a good action, a3 
some piece of courage or charity, much as they 
W'ould pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appear- 
ance on parade. Their works are done as an apol- 
ogy or extenuation of their living in the world, — as 
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their 
virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but 
to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. 
I much prefer that it should be of a low r er strain, so 
it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glit- 
tering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and 
sw r eet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask pri- 
mary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this 
appeal from the man to his actions. I know that foi 
myself it makes no difference whether I do or for 
bear those actions which are reckoned excellent. 1 
cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have 
intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts mny be, 
I actually am, and do not need for my own assur- 
ance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary 
testimony. 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not wliai 
the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


47 


End in intellectual life, may serve for the whole dis- 
tinction between greatness and meanness. It is the 
harder, because you will always find those who think 
they know what is your duty better than you know 
it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s 
opinion ; it is easy in solitude to live after our own ; 
but the great man is he who in the midst of the 
crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independ- 
ence of solitude. 

The objection to conforming to usages that have 
become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. 
It loses your time and blurs the impression of your 
character. If you maintain a dead church, con- 
tribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great 
party either for the government or against it, spread 
your table like base housekeepers, — under all these 
screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man 
you are. And, of course, so much force is with- 
drawn from your proper life. But do your work, 
and I shall know you. Do your work, and you 
shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what 
a blindman’s-bufF is this game of conformity. If I 
know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear 
a preacher announce for his text and topic the expe- 
diency of one of the institutions of his church. Do 
I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say 
a new and spontaneous word ? Do I not know that, 
with all this ostentation of examining the grounds 


48 


ESSAY I*. 


of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I 
not know that he is pledged to himself not to look 
but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, 
but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, 
and these airs of the bench are the emptiest aflecta- 
tion. Well, most men have bound their eyes with 
one or another handkerchief, and attached them- 
selves to some one of these communities of opinion. 
This conformity makes them not false in a few par- 
ticulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all partic- 
ulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their 
two is not the real two, their four not the real four; 
so that every word they say chagrins us, and we 
know not where to begin to set them right. Mean- 
time nature is not slow to equip us in the prison- 
uniform of the party to which we adhere. We 
come to wear one cut of face and figure, and ac- 
quire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. 
There is a mortifying experience in particular, 
which does not fail to wreak itself also in the gener- 
al history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the 
forced smile which we put on in company where 
we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation 
which does not interest us. The muscles, not 
spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurp- 
ing wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the 
face with the most disagreeable sensation. 

For nonconformity the world whips you with its 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


4<J 

displeasure. And therefore a man must know how 
to estimate a sour face. The by-standcrs look 
askance on him in the public street or in the 
friend’s parlour. If this aversation had its origin 
in contempt and resistance like his own, he might 
well go home with a sad countenance ; but the sour 
faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have 
no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind 
blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discon- 
tent of the multitude more formidable than that of the 
senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm 
man who knows the world to brook the rage of the 
cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and pru- 
dent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable 
themselves. But when to their feminine rage the 
indignation of the people is added, when the igno- 
rant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent 
brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made 
to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity 
and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no con- 
cernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is 
our consistency ; a reverence for our past act or 
word, because the eyes of others have no other 
data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and 
we are loath to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your 
shoulder ? Why drag about this corpse of your 
4 


50 


ESSAY K. 


memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have 
stated in this or that public place ? Suppose yor 
should contradict yourself ; what then : It seems to 
be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory 
alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to 
bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed 
present, and live ev*er in a new day. In your meta- 
physics you have denied personality to the Deity : 
yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield 
to them heart and life, though they should clothe 
God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as 
Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little 
minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers 
and divines. With consistency a great soul has sim- 
ply nothing to do. He may as w T ell concern himsel! 
with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think 
now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to- 
morrow thinks in hard words again, though it con- 
tradict every thing you said to-day. — 4 Ah, so you 
shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, 
then, to be misunderstood ? Pythagoras was misun- 
derstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and 
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure 
and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is 
to be misunderstood. 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the 
sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his be- 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


51 


mg, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are 
insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it 
matter how you gauge and try him. A character is 
like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza ; — read it for- 
ward, backward, or across, it still spells the same 
thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God 
allows me, let me record day by day my honest 
thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot 
doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean 
it not, and see it not. My book should smell of 
pines and resound with the hum of insects. The 
swallow over my window should interweave that 
thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web 
also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches 
above our wills. Men imagine that they communi- 
cate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and 
do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every 
moment. 

There will be an agreement in whatever variety 
of actions, so they be each honest and natural in 
their hour. For of one will, the actions will be har- 
monious, however unlike they seem. These varieties 
are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height 
of thought. One tendency unites them all. The 
voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred 
tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and 
it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your 
genuine action will explain itself, and will explain 


52 


ESSAY II. 


your other genuine actions. Your conformity ex- 
plains nothing. Act singly, and what you have al- 
ready done singly will justify you now. Greatness 
appeals to the future. If 1 can be firm enough to- 
day to do right, and scorn eyes, 1 must have done 
so much right before as to defend me now. Be it 
how it will, do right now. Always scorn appear- 
ances, and you always may. The force of character 
is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work 
their health into this. What makes the majesty of 
the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills 
die imagination ? The consciousness of a train of 
great days and victories behind. They shed an 
united light on the advancing actor. He is attended 
as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which 
throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into 
Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye. 
Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. 
It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day 
because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it 
homage, because it is not a trap for our love and 
homage, but is self-denendent, self-derived, and there- 
fore of an old immaculate pedigree even if shown in 
a young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last of 
conformity and consistency. Let the words be ga 
zetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the 
gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spar- 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


i>3 


tan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A 
great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not 
wish to please him ; I wish that he should wish to 
please me. I will stand here for humanity, and 
though I would make it kind, I would make it true. 
Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity 
and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the 
face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which 
is the upshot of all history, that there is a great re- 
sponsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man 
works ; that a true man belongs to no other time or 
place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there 
is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all 
events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us 
of somewhat else, or of some other person. Char- 
acter, reality, reminds you of nothing else ; it takes 
place of the whole creation. The man must be so 
much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. 
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age ; 
requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully 
to accomplish his design ; — and posterity seem to 
follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar 
is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Em- 
pire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow 
and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with 
virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the 
lengthened shadow of one man ; as, Monachism, of 
the Hermit Antony ; the Reformation, of Luther , 


54 


ESSAY II. 


Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley ; Abo 
luion, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called u the 
height ol Rome ” ; and all history resolves itself very 
easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest 
persons. 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things 
under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk 
up and down with the air of a charity -boy, a bastard, 
or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. 
But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself 
which corresponds to the force which built a tower 
or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks 
on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly 
book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a 
gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 1 Who are 
you, Sir ? * Yet they all are his, suitors for his no- 
tice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come 
out and take possession. The picture waits for my 
verdict : it is not to command me, but I am to settle 
its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot 
who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried 
to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in 
the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all 
obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that 
he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, 
that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in 
the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes 
up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true 
prince. 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


55 


Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In 
history, our imagination plays us false. 'Kingdom 
and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabu- 
lary than private John and Edward in a small house 
and common day’s work ; but the things of life are 
the same to both ; the sum total of both is the same. 
Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, 
and Gustavus ? Suppose they were virtuous ; did 
they wear out virtue ? As great a stake depends on 
your private act to-day, as followed their public and 
renowned steps. When private men shall act with 
original views, the lustre will be transferred from the 
actions of kings to those of gentlemen. 

The world has been instructed by its kings, who 
have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has 
been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual rever- 
ence that is due from man to man. The joyful loy- 
alty with which men have everywhere suffered the 
king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among 
them by a law of his own, make his own scale of 
men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits 
not with money but with honor, and represent the 
law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which 
they obscurely signified their consciousness of their 
own right and comeliness, the right of every man. 

The magnetism which all original action exerts is 
explained when we inquire the reason of self trust. 
Who is the Trustee ? What is the aboriginal Self, 


56 


ESSAY II. 


on which a universa. reliance may be grounded ? 
What is the nature and power of that science-baffling 
star, without parallax, without calculable elements, 
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and im- 
pure actions, if the least mark of independence ap- 
pear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once 
the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which 
we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this pn 
mary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings 
are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind 
which analysis cannot go, all things find their com- 
mon origin. For, the sense of being which in calm 
hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not 
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, 
from man, but one with them, and proceeds obvious- 
ly from die same source wdience their life and being 
also proceed. We first share the life by which things 
exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in na- 
ture, and forget that w T e have shared their cause. 
Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here 
are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wis- 
dom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and 
atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, 
which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its 
activity. When w r e discern justice, wdien w r e discern 
truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage 
to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we 
seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


57 


s at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can 
affirm. Every man discriminates between the volun- 
tary acts of bis mind, and his involuntary per- 
ceptions, and knows that to his involuntary percep- 
tions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the 
expression of them, but he knows that these things 
are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My 
wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving ; — the 
idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command 
my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people con- 
tradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of 
opinions, or rather much more readily ; for, they do 
not distinguish between perception and notion. They 
fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But 
perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a 
trait, my children will see it after me, and in course 
of time, all mankind, — although it may chance that 
no one has seen it before me. For my perception 
of it is as much a fact as the sun. 

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so 
pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It 
must be that when God speaketh he should commu- 
nicate, not one thing, but all things ; should fill the 
world with his voice ; should scatter forth light, na- 
ture, time, souls, from the centre of the present 
thought ; and new date and new create the whole. 
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine 
wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, 


58 


ESSAY II. 


texts, temples fall ; it lives now, and rosorbspast and 
future into the present hour. All things are made 
sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. 
All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, 
and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular mir- 
acles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know 
and speak of God, and carries you backward to the 
phraseology of some old mouldered nation in anoth- 
er country, in another world, believe him not. Is 
die acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and 
completion ? Is the parent better than the child 
mto whom he has cast his ripened being ? Whence, 
then, this worship of the past ? The centuries are 
conspirators against the sanity and authority of the 
soul. Time and space are but physiological colors 
which the eye makes, but the soul is light ; where 
it is, is day ; where it was, is night ; and history 
is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing 
more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my 
being and becoming. 

Man is timid and apologetic ; he is no longer up- 
right ; he dares not say C I think,’ ‘I am,’ but 
quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before 
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These 
roses under my window make no reference to for- 
mer roses or to better ones ; they are for what they 
are ; they exist with God to-day. There is no time 
to them. There is simply the rose ; it is perfect w 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


59 


every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud 
has burst, its whole life acts ; in the full-blown flow- 
er there is no more ; in the leafless root there is no 
less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, 
in all moments alike. But man postpones or re- 
members ; lie does not live in the present, but with 
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the 
r ;hes that surround him, stands on titpoe to foresee 
the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he 
too lives with nature in the present, above time. 

This should be plain enough. Yet see what 
strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, 
unless he speak the phraseology of I know not 
what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not 
always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few 
lives. We are like children who repeat by rote 
the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they 
grow older, of the men of talents and character they 
chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact 
words they spoke ; afterwards, when they come 
into the point of view which those had who uttered 
these sayings, they understand them, and are willing 
to let the words go ; for, at any time, they can use 
words as good when occasion comes. If we live 
truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong 
man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. 
When we have new perception, we shall gladly 
disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as 


60 


ESSAY II. 


old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice 
shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and 
the rustle of the corn. 

And now at last the highest truth on this subject 
remains unsaid ; probably cannot be said ; for all 
that we say is the far-off remembering of the intu- 
ition. That thought, by what I can now nearest 
approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, 
when you have life in yourself, it is not by any 
known or accustomed way ; you shall not discern 
the foot-prints of any other ; you shall not see the 
face of man ; you shall not hear any name ; — 
the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly 
strange and new. It shall exclude example and 
experience. You take the way from man, not to 
man. All persons that ever existed are its forgot- 
ten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. 
There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour 
of vision, there is nothing that can be called grat- 
itude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over 
passion beholds identity and eternal causation, per- 
ceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and 
calms itself with knowing that all things go well. 
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South 
Sea, — long intervals of time, years, centuries, — are 
of no account. This which I think and feel underlay 
every former state of life and circumstances, as it 
does underlie my present, and what is called life, 
find what is called death. 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


61 


Life only avails, not the having lived. Power 
ceases in the instant of repose ; it resides in the 
moment of transition from a past to a new slate, 
in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. 
This one fact the world hates, that the soul be- 
comes ; for that for ever degrades the past, turns 
all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, con- 
founds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and 
Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of 
self-reliance ? Inasmuch as the soul is present, 
there will be power not confident but agent. To 
talk of reliance is a poor external way of speak- 
ing. Speak rather of that which relies, because it 
works and is. Who has more obedience than I 
masters me, though he should not raise his finger. 
Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of 
spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of 
eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue b 
Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic 
and permeable to principles, by the law of nature 
must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, 
rich men, poets, who are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly 
reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all 
into the ever-blessed One. Self-existence is the at- 
tribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the 
measure of good by the degree in which it enters in- 
to all lower forms. All things real are so by so much 


62 


ESSAY 11. 


virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, 
hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, 
are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples 
of its presence and impure action. 1 see the same 
law working in nature for conservation and growth 
Power is in nature the essential measure of right. 
Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms 
which cannot help itself. The genesis and matura- 
tion of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree 
recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital 
resources of every animal and vegetable, are dem- 
onstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self- 
relying soul. 

Thus all concentrates : let us not rove ; let us 
sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and aston- 
ish the intruding rabble of men and books and insti- 
tutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. 
Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for 
God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, 
and our docility to our own law demonstrate the pov- 
erty of nature and fortune beside our native riches. 

But now w T e are a mob. Man does not stand in 
awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at 
home, to put itself in communication with the inter- 
nal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water 
of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I 
iike the silent church before the service begins, bet- 
ter than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


C3 


chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a pre- 
cinct or sanctuary ! So let us always sit. Why should 
we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or fa- 
ther, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or 
are said to have the same blood ? All men have my 
blood, and I have all men’s. Not for that will I 
adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent 
of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must 
not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be 
elevation. At times the whole world seems to be 
in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic tri- 
fles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, 
charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and 
say, — ‘Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; 
come not into their confusion. The power men 
possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curios- 
ty. No man can come near me but through my 
act. u What we love that we have, but by desire 
we bereave ourselves of the love.” 

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obe- 
dience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations ; 
let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor 
and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon 
breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by 
speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and 
lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of 
these deceived and deceiving people with whom we 
converse. Say to them, O father. O mother, O 


64 


ESSAY II. 


wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you 
after appearances hitherto. Henceforvvaid I am the 
truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward 
L obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have 
no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to 
nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the 
cnaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I 
must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I ap- 
peal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot 
break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can 
love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If 
you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you 
should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I 
will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do 
strongly before the sun and moon w hatever inly re- 
joices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, 
I will love you ; if you are not, I will not hurt you 
and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are 
true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to 
your companions ; I will seek my own. I do this not 
selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your in- 
terest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have 
dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh 
to-day ? You will soon love what is dictated by 
your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the 
ti uth, it will bring us out safe at last. — But so you 
may give these friends pain. Yes, but 1 cannot sell 
my liberty and my power, to save their Feasibility. 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


65 


Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, 
when they look out into, the region of absolute truth ; 
then will they justify me, and do the same thing. 

The populace think that your rejection of popular 
standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere 
aiitinomianism ; and the bold sensualist will use the 
name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law 
of consciousness abides. There are two confession- 
als, in one or the other of which we must be shriven 
You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing your- 
self in the direct , or in the reflex way. Consider 
whether you have satisfied your relations to father, 
mother, cousin, neighbour, town, cat, and dog ; 
whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may 
also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to 
myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect cir- 
cle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that 
are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it 
enables me to dispense with the popular code. If 
any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep 
its commandment one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in him 
who has cast off the common motives of humanity, 
and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. 
High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, 
that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, 
to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as 
strong as iron necessity is to others ! 

5 


66 


ESSAY II. 


If any man consider the present aspects of what 
is called by distinction society , lie will see the need 
of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem 
to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, de 
sponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid 
of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. 
Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We 
want men and women who shall renovate life and our 
social state, but we see that most natures are insol- 
vent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an am- 
bition out of all proportion to their practical force, 
and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our 
housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupa- 
tions, our marriages, our religion, we have not cho- 
sen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour 
soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where 
strength is born. 

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, 
they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men 
say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one 
of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within 
one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Bos- 
ton or New York, it seems to his friends and to 
himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in 
complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from 
New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all 
the professions, who teams it , farms it , peddles , keeps 
a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Con- 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


6? 


gress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive 
years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is 
worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks 
abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 
‘ studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his 
life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a 
hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of 
man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but 
can and must detach themselves ; that with the exer- 
cise of self-trust, new powers shall appear ; that a 
man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to 
the nations, that he should be ashamed of our com- 
passion, and that the moment he acts from himself, 
tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs 
out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank 
and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the 
life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to 
all history. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance 
must work a revolution in all the offices and rela- 
tions of men ; in their religion ; in their education ; 
in their pursuits ; their modes of living : their asso- 
ciation ; in their property ; in their speculative 
views. 

1 . In what prayers do men allow themselves * 
That which they call a holy office is not so much as 
brave a..d manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for 
nome foreign addition to come through some foreign 


68 


ESSAY II. 


virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes ol natural 
and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. 
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any 
thing less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the 
contemplation of the facts of life from the highest 
point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and 
jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing 
bis works good. But prayer as a means to effect a 
private end is meanness and theft. It supposes du- 
alism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As 
soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. 
He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer 
of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the 
prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his 
oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though 
for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher’s Bonduca, 
when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Au- 
date, replies, — 

“ His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours; 

Our valors are our best gods.” 

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. 
Discontent is the want of self-reliance : it is infirm- 
ity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby 
help the sufferer ; if not, attend your own work, and 
already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympa- 
thy is just as base. We come to them who weep 
foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead 
of imparting to them truth and health in rough elec- 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


69 


trie shocks, putting them once more in communication 
with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy 
in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men 
*s the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung 
wide : him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all 
eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him 
and embraces him, because he did not need it. We 
solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate 
him, because he held on his way and scorned our 
disapprobation. The gods love him because men 
hated him. u To the persevering mortal, ” said Zo- 
roaster, u the blessed Immortals are swift.” 

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are 
their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say 
with those foolish Israelites, 4 Let not God speak to 
us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with 
us, and we will obey.’ Everywhere I am hindered 
of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut 
his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of 
his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God. Eve- 
ry new mind is a new classification. If it prove a 
mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a 
Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it im- 
poses its classification on other men, and lo ! a new 
system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, 
and so to the number of the objects it touches and 
brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. 
But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, 


70 


ESSAY II. 


winch are also classifications of some powerful mind 
acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man’s 
relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Qua- 
kerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same 
delight in subordinating every thing to the new ter- 
minology, as a girl who has just learned botany in 
seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will 
happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intel- 
lectual power has grown by the study of liis master’s 
mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classifica- 
tion is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a 
speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the 
system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with 
the walls of the universe ; the luminaries of heaven 
seem to them hung on the arch their master built. 
They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right 
to see, — how you can see ; c It must be somehow 
that you stole the light from us.’ They do not yet 
perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will 
break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them 
chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are hon- 
est and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will 
be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot 
and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and 
ioyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam ovei 
the universe as on the first morning. 

2. It is for want of self-culture that the supersti 
ion of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


71 


Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Ameri- 
cans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece 
venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast 
where they were, like an axis of the earth. In man- 
ly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is 
no traveller ; the wise man stays at home, and when 
his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call 
him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is 
at home still, and shall make men sensible by the 
expression of his countenance, that he goes the mis- 
sionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and 
men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a 
valet. 

I have no churlish objection to the circumnaviga- 
tion of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, 
and benevolence, so that the man is first domesti- 
cated, or does not go abroad with the hope of find- 
ing somewhat greater than he knows. He who 
travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he 
does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows 
old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, 
in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and 
dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins. 

Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first jour- 
neys discover to us the indifference of places. At 
home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be 
intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I 
pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the 


72 


ESSAY II. 


sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside 
me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, 
identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, 
and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with 
sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated 
My giant goes with me wherever I go. 

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a 
deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual 
action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system 
of education festers restlessness. Our minds travel 
when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We 
imitate ; and what is imitation but the travelling of the 
mind ? Our houses are built with foreign taste ; our 
shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments ; our 
opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow 
the Past and the Distant. The soul created the 
arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his 
own mind that the artist sought his model. It was 
an application of his own thought to the thing to 
be done and the conditions to be observed. And 
why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic mod- 
el ? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and 
quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and 
if the American artist will study with hope and love 
the precise thing to be done by him, considering the 
climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants 
of the people, the habit and form of the govern- 
ment, he will create a house in which all these will 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


73 


find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will 
be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself ; never imitate. Your own 
gift you can present every moment with the cumu- 
lative force of a whole life’s cultivation ; but of the 
adopted talent of another, you have only an extem- 
poraneous, half possession. That which each can 
do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No 
man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person 
has exhibited it. Where is the master who could 
have taught Shakspeare ? Where is the master who 
could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or 
Bacon, or Newton ? Every great man is a unique. 
The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he 
could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made 
by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is as- 
signed you, and you cannot hope too much or dare 
too much. There is at this moment for you an ut- 
terance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel 
of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen 
of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. 
Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with 
thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself ; but 
if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely 
you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice ; 
for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one 
nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of 
thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce 
the Foreworld again. 


74 


ESSAY II. 


4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look 
abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men 
plume themselves on the improvement of society, 
and no man improves. 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one 
side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continu- 
al changes : it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is chris- 
tianized, it is rich, it is scientific ; but this change 
is not amelioration. For everything that is given, 
something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and 
loses old instincts. What a contrast between the 
well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with 
a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his 
pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose prop- 
erty is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided 
twentieth of a shed to sleep under ! But compare 
the health of the two men, and you shall see that 
the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If 
the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a 
broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite 
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, 
and the same blow shall send the white to his grave. 

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost 
the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, 
but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a 
fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the 
hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac 
he has, and so being sure of the information when 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


75 


he wants it, the man in the street does not know a 
star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe ; 
the equinox he knows as little ; and the whole bright 
calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. 
His note-books impair his memory ; his libraries 
overload his wit ; the insurance-office increases the 
number of accidents ; and it may be a question 
whether machinery does not encumber ; whether we 
have not lost by refinement some energy, by a 
Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, 
some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was 
a Stoic ; but in Christendom where is the Chris- 
tian ? 

There is no more deviation in the moral standard 
than in the standard of height or bulk No greater 
men are now than ever were. A singular equality 
may be observed between the great men of the first 
and of the last ages ; nor can all the science, art, 
religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth centmy 
avail to educate greater men than Plutarch’s heroes, 
three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in 
time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, 
Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they 
«eave no class. He who is really of their class 
will not be called by their name, but will be his 
own man. and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. 
The arts and inventions of each period are only 
its costume, and do not invigorate men. The 


76 


ESSAY II. 


harm of the improved machinery may compensate 
its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so 
much in their fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry 
and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the re- 
sources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera- 
glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial 
phenomena than any one since. Columbus found 
the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious 
to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means 
and machinery, which were introduced with loud 
laudation a few years or centuries before. The 
great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned 
the improvements of the art of war among the tri- 
umphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered 
Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling 
back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all 
aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a 
perfect army, says Las Casas, “ without abolishing 
our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, 
until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier 
should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his 
hand-mill, and bake his bread himself.” 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, 
but the water of which it is composed does not. 
The same particle does not rise from the valley to 
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The 
persons who make up a nation to da), next year die, 
and their experience with them. 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


n 

And so the reliance on Property, including the 
reliance on governments which protect it, is the want 
of self-reliance. Men have looked away from them- 
selves and at things so long, that they have come to 
esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as 
guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on 
these, because they feel them to be assaults on prop- 
erty. They measure their esteem of each other by 
what each has, and not by what each is. But a 
cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, 
out of new respect for his nature. Especially he 
hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — 
came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime ; then 
he feels that it is not having ; it does not belong to 
him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, be- 
cause no revolution or no robber takes it away. But 
that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, 
and what the man acquires is living property, which 
does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolu- 
tions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually 
renews itself wherever the man breathes. u Thy lot 
or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali, “ is seeking 
after thee ; therefore be at rest from seeking after 
it.” Our dependence on these foreign goods leads 
us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political 
oarties meet in numerous conventions ; the greater 
the concourse, and with each new uproar of an- 
nouncement, The delegation from Essex ! The 


78 


ESSAY II. 


Democrats from New Hampshire ! The Whigs of 
Maine ! the young patriot feels himself stronger than 
before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like 
manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote 
and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends ! will 
the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a 
method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man 
puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I 
see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker 
by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better 
than a town ? Ask nothing of men, and in the end- 
less mutation, thou only firm column must presently 
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He 
who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak 
because he has looked for good out of him and else 
where, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitat- 
ingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands 
in the erect position, commands his limbs, works 
miracles ; just as a man who stands on his feet is 
stronger than a man who stands on his head. 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men 
gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her 
wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these 
winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chan- 
cellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and 
hou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shah 
sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A politi- 
cal victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, 


SELF-RELIANCE. 


79 


or the return of your absent friend, or some other 
favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think 
good days are preparing for you. Do not believe 
it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. 
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of 
principles. 





COMPENSATION. 


The wings of Time are black and white? 
Pied with morning and with night. 
Mountain tall and ocean deep 
Trembling balance duly keep. 

In changing moon, in tidal wave, 

Glows the feud of Want and Have. 
Gauge of more and less through space 
Electric star and pencil plays. 

The lonely Earth amid the balls 
That hurry through the eternal halls, 

A makeweight flying to the void, 
Supplemental asteroid, 

Or compensatory spark, 

Shoots across the neutral Dark. 


ti 


Man ’s the elm, and Wealth the vine , 
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine : 
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive, 
None from its stock that vine can reave. 
Fear not, then, thou child infirm, 

There ’s no god dare wrong a worm. 
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts, 

And power to him who power exerts ; 
Hast not thy share ? On winged feet, 
Lo ! it rushes thee to meet ; 

And all that Nature made thy own, 
Floating in air or pent in stone, 

Will rive the hills and swim the sea. 
And, like thy shadow, follow tlioo. 


ESSAY III. 


COMPENSATION 


Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a 
discourse on Compensation : for it seemed to me 
when very young, that on this subject life was 
ahead of theology, and the people knew more than 
the preachers taught. The documents, too, from 
which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fan- 
cy by their endless variety, and lay always before 
me, even in sleep ; for they are the tools in our 
hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of 
the street, the farm, and the dwelling-house, greetings, 
relations, debts and credits, the influence of charac- 
ter, the nature and endowment of all men. It seem- 
ed to me, also, that in it might be shown men a ray of 
divinity, the present action of the soul of this world, 
clean from all vestige of tradition, and so the heart 
of man might be bathed by an inundation of eterna. 
love, conversing with that which he knows was al- 
ways and always must be, because it really is now 


84 


ESSAY III. 


It appeared, moreover, that if this doctrine could be 
stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright 
intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to 
us, it would be a star in many dark hours and crook- 
ed passages in our journey that would not suffer us 
to lose our way. 

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing 
a sermon at church. The preacher, a man esteemed 
for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner the 
doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed, that 
judgment is not executed in this world ; that the 
wicked are successful^ that the good are miserable ; 
and then urged from reason and from Scripture a 
compensation to be made to both parties in the next 
life. No offence appeared to be taken by the con- 
gregation at this doctrine. As far as I could ob- 
serve, when the meeting broke up, they separated 
without remark on the sermon. 

Yet what was the import of this teaching ? What 
did the preacher mean by saying that the good are 
miserable in the present life ? Was it that houses 
and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are 
had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor 
and despised ; and that a compensation is to be made 
to these last hereafter, by giving them the like grati- 
fications another day, — bank-stock an J doubloons, 
venison and champagne ? This must be the compen- 
sation intended ; for what else ? Is it that they are 


COMPENSATION. 


85 

to have leave to pray and praise ? to love and serve 
men ? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate 
inference the disciple would draw was, — ‘We are 
to have such a good time as the sinners have now ’ ; 
— or, to push it to its extreme import, — 4 You sin 
now •, we shall sin by and by ; we would sin now, if 
we could ; not being successful, we expect our re- 
venge to-morrow.’ 

The fallacy lay in the immense concession, that 
the bad are successful ; that justice is not done now. 
The blindness of the preacher consisted in deferring 
to the base estimate of the market of what consti- 

m 

tutes a manly success, instead of confronting and con- 
victing the world from the truth ; announcing the 
presence of the soul ; the omnipotence of the will : 
and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of 
success and falsehood. 

T find a similar base tone in the popular religious 
works of the day, and the same doctrines assumed 
by the literary men when occasionally they treat the 
related topics. I think that our popular theology 
has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the 
superstitions it has displaced. But men are better 
than this theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. 
Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doc- 
trine behind him in his own experience ; and all men 
feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot de- 
monstrate. For men are wiser than they know. 


ESSAY III. 


t'Z 

That which they hear in schools and pulpits withou 
afterthought, if said in conversation, would probably 
be questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a 
mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, 
he is answered by a silence which conveys well 
enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hear- 
er, but his incapacity to make his own statement. 

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to 
record some facts that indicate the path of the law 
of Compensation ; happy beyond my expectation, 
if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle. 

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in ev- 
ery part of nature ; in darkness and light ; in heat 
and cold ; in the ebb and flow of waters ; in male 
and female ; in the inspiration and expiration of plants 
and animals ; in the equation of quantity and quality 
in the fluids of the animal body ; in the systole and 
diastole of the heart ; in the undulations of fluids, 
and of sound ; in the centrifugal and centripetal grav- 
ity ; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. 
Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle ; 
the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. 
If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty 
here, you must condense there. An inevitable dual- 
ism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and 
suggests another thing to make it whole ; as, spirit, 
matter ; man, woman ; odd, even ; subjective, ob- 


COMPENSATION. 


87 


leclive : in, out ; upper, under ; motion, rest ; yea, 
nay. 

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of 
its parts. The entire system of things gets repre- 
sented in every particle. There is somewhat that 
resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, 
man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a 
kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal 
trib£. The reaction, so grand in the elements, is re- 
peated within these small boundaries. For example, 
in the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed 
that no creatures are favorites, but a certain compen- 
sation balances, every gift and every defect. A sur 
plusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction 
from another part of the same creature. If the head 
and neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are 
cut short. 

The theory of the mechanic forces is another ex- 
ample. What we gain in power is .ost in time ; and 
the converse. The periodic or compensating errors 
of the planets is another instance. The influences 
of climate and soil in political history are another. 
The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does 
not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions. 

The same dualism underlies the nature and con- 
dition of man. Every excess causes a defect ; every 
defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour ; every 
evil its good. Everv faculty which is a receiver of 


88 


ESSAY III. 


pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse It 
is to answer for its moderation with its life. For 
every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For eve- 
ry thing you have missed, you have gained something 
else ; and for every thing you gain, you lose some- 
thing. If riches increase, they are increased that use 
them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature 
takes out of the man wdiat she puts into his chest , 
swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates 
monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea 
do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest 
tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equal- 
ize themselves. There is always .some levelling 
circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the 
strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the 
same ground with all others. Is a man too strong 
and fierce for society, and by temper and position a 
Dad citizen, — a morose ruffian, with a dash of the 
pirate in him ; — nature sends him a troop of pretty 
sons and daughters, who are getting along in the 
dame’s classes at the village school, and love and 
fear for them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. 
Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and fel- 
spar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and 
keeps her balance true. 

The farmer imagines power and place are fine 
things. But the President has paid dear for his 
White House. It has commonly cost him all his 


COMPENSATION. 


89 


peace, and . the best of his manly attributes. To 
preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appear 
ance before the world, he is content to eat dust be- 
fore the real masters who stand erect behind tne 
throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and 
permanent grandeur of genius ? Neither has this an 
immunity. He who by force of will or of thought is 
great, and overlooks thousands, has the charges of 
that eminence. With every influx of light comes 
new danger. Has he light ? he must bear witness 
to the light, and always outrun that sympathy which 
gives him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to 
new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate 
father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that 
the world loves and admires and covets ? — he must 
cast behind him their admiration, and afflict them by 
faithfulness to his truth, and become a byword and a 
hissing. 

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It 
is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. 
Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt 
diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new 
evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If 
the government is cruel, the governor’s life is not 
safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield noth- 
ing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, ju- 
ries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private 
vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific 


90 


ESSAY III. 


democracy, the pressure is resisted by an over- 
charge of energy in the citizen, and life glows with 
a fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions 
of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or felicities 
of condition, and to establish themselves with grea* 
indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. Un* 
der all governments the influence of character re- 
mains the same, — in Turkey and in New England 
about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, 
history honestly confesses that man must have been 
as free as culture could make him. 

These appearances indicate the fact that the uni- 
verse is represented in every one of its particles 
Every thing in nature contains all the powers of na- 
ture. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff ; as 
the naturalist sees one type under every metamor- 
phosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish 
as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as 
a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the 
main character of the type, but part for part all the 
details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, ener- 
gies, and whole system of every other. Every occu- 
pation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the 
world, and a correlative of every other. Each one 
is an entire emblem of human life ; of its good and 
ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And 
each one must somehow accommodate the whole 
man, and recite all Ills destiny. 


COMPENSATION. 


91 


The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The 
microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less 
perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, 
motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduc- 
tion that take hold on eternity, — all find room to 
consist in the small creature. So do we put our life 
into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence 
is, that God reappears with all his parts in every 
moss and cobweb. The value of the universe con- 
trives to throw itself into every point. If the good 
is there, so is the evil ; if the affinity, so the repul- 
sion ; if the force, so the limitation. 

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. 
That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of 
us is a law. We feel its inspiration ; out there in his- 
tory we can see its fatal strength. “ It is in the world, 
and the world was made by it.” Justice is not post- 
poned. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all 
parts of life, ol kv[3oi A ios del evninrovai, — The dice 
of God are always loaded. The world looks like 
a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, 
which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take 
what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor 
less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, eve- 
ry crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every 
wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we 
call retribution is the universal necessity by which 
die whole appears wherever a part appears. If you 


92 


ESSAY TIT. 


see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or 
a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs 
is there behind. 

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, inte- 
grates itself, in a twofold manner ; first, in the thing, 
or in real nature ; and secondly, in the circum- 
stance, or in apparent nature. Men call the cir- 
cumstance the retribution. The causal retribution 
is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retri- 
bution in the circumstance is seen by the under- 
standing ; it is inseparable from the thing, but is 
often spread over a long time, and so does not 
become distinct until after many years. The spe- 
cific stripes may follow late after the offence, but 
they follow because they accompany it. Crime and 
punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a 
fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of 
the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, 
means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed ; 
for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end 
preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed. 

Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses 
to be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, 
to appropriate ; for example, — to gratify the senses, 
we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs 
of the character. The ingenuity of man has always 
?een dedicated to the solution of one problem,— how 
to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual stror g, the 


COMPENSATION. 


93 


sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the mora. 
deep, the moral fair ; that is, again, to contrive to 
cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it 
bottomless ; to get a one end , without an other end 
The soul says, Eat ; the body would feast. The 
soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh 
and one soul ; the body would join the flesh only. 
The soul says, Have dominion over all things to 
the ends of virtue ; the body would have the power 
over things to its own ends. 

The soul strives amain to live and work through 
all things. It would be the only fact. All things 
shall be added unto it, — power, pleasure, knowl- 
edge, beauty. The particular man aims to be some- 
body ; to set up for himself ; to truck and higgle 
for a private good ; and, in particulars, to ride, that 
he may ride ; to dress, that he may be dressed ; 
to eat, that he may eat ; and to govern, that he 
may be seen. Men seek to be great ; they would 
have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think 
that to be great is to possess one side of nature, — 
the sweet, without the other side, — the bitter. 

This dividing and detaching is steadily counter- 
acted. Up to this day, it must be owned, no 
Drojector has had the smallest success. The part- 
ed water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is 
taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable 
things, power out of strong things, as soon as we 


94 


ESSAY III. - 


seek to separate them from the whole. We can 
no more halve things and get the sensual good, 
by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have 
no outside, or a light without a shadow. u Drive 
out nature with a fork, she comes running back.” 

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which 
the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another 
brags that he does not know ; that they do not 
touch him ; — but the brag is on his lips, the con- 
ditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one 
part, they attack him in another more vital part. 
If he has escaped them in form, and in the ap- 
pearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and 
fled from himself, and the retribution is so much 
death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to 
make this separation of the good from the tax, 
that the experiment would not be tried, — since 
to try it is to be mad, — but for the circumstance, 
that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion 
and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so 
that the man ceases to see God whole in each ob 
ject, but is able to see the sensual allurement of an 
object, and not see the sensual hurt ; he sees the 
mermaid’s head, but not the dragon’s tail ; and 
thinks he can cut off that which he would have, 
from that which he would not have. “ How secret 
art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in si- 
lence. O thou only great God, sprinkling with an 


COMPENSATION. 


95 


unwearied Providence certain penal blindnesses up* 
on such as have unbridled desires ! ” # 

The human soul is true to these facts in the 
painting of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, 
of conversation. It finds a tongue in literature 
unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Su- 
preme Mind ; but having traditionally ascribed to 
him many base actions, they involuntarily made 
amends to reason, by tying up the hands of so bad 
a god. He is made as helpless as a king of Eng- 
land. Prometheus knows one secret which Jove 
must bargain for; Minerva, another. He cannot get 
his own thunders ; Minerva keeps the key of them. 

w Of all the gods, I only know the keys 
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults 
His thunders sleep.” 

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and 
of its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the 
same ethics ; and it would seem impossible for any 
fable to be invented and get any currency which was 
not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, 
and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles 
is not quite invulnerable ; the sacred waters did not 
wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, 
m the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf 
fal on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s 
blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal 


St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I 


96 


ESSAY III. 


And so it must be. There is a crack in every 
thing God has made. It would seem, there is al- 
ways this vindictive circumstance stealing in at una- 
wares, even into the wild poesy in wdiich the human 
fancy attempted to make bold holiday, and to shake 
itself free of the old laws, — this back-stroke, this 
kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal ; that 
in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold. 

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who 
keeps watch in the universe, and lets no offence go 
unchastised. The Furies, they said, are attendants 
on justice, and if the sun in heaven should transgress 
his path, they would punish him. The poets related 
that stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs 
had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of their 
owners ; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector 
dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels 
of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector 
gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell. 
They recorded, that when the Thasians erected a 
statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of 
his rivals went to it by night, and endeavoured to 
throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he 
moved it from its pedestal, and was crushed to death 
beneath its fall. 

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It 
came from thought above the will of the writer 
That is the best part of each writer, which has noth- 


COMPENSATION. 


97 


ng private in it ; that which he does not Know , 
that which flowed out of his constitution, and not 
from his too active invention ; that which in the 
study of a single artist you might not easily find, but 
in the study of many, you would abstract as the spirit 
of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man 
in that early Hellenic world, that I would know. 
The name and circumstance of Phidias, however 
convenient for history, embarrass when we come 
to the highest criticism. We are to see that which 
man was tending to do in a given period, and was 
hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the 
interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shak- 
speare, the organ whereby man at the moment 
wrought. 

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in 
the proverbs of all nations, which are always the 
literature of reason, or the statements of an absolute 
truth, without qualification. Proverbs, like the sa- 
cred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the 
intuitions. That which the droning world, chained 
to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his 
own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs with- 
out contradiction. And this law of laws which the 
pulpit, the senate, and the college deny, is hourly 
preached in all markets and workshops by flights of 
proverbs, whose leaching is as true and as omni- 
present as that of birds and flies. 

7 


98 


ESSAY III. 


All things are double, one against another. — Til 
for tat ; an eye for an eye ; a tooth for a tooth 
blood for blood ; measure for measure ; love for 
love. — Give and it shall be given you. — He that 
watereth shall be watered himself. — What will you 
have ? quoth God ; pay for it and take it. — Noth- 
ing venture, nothing have. — Thou shall he paid 
exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less. — 
Who doth not work shall not eat. — Harm watch, 
harm catch. — Curses always recoil on the head of 
him who imprecates them. — If you put a chain 
around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens 
itself around your own. — Bad counsel confounds 
the adviser. — The Devil is an ass. 

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our 
action is overmastered and characterized above our 
will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end 
quite aside from the public good, but our act arranges 
itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the 
poles of the world. 

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With 
his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait to 
the eye of his companions by every word. Every 
opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread- 
ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in 
the thrower’s bag. Or, rather, it is a harpoon hulled 
at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in 
die boat, and if the harpoon is not good, or not well 


COMPENSATION. 


99 


:hrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman m twain, 
or to sink the boat. 

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong 
“ No man had ever a point of pride that was not 
injurious to him,” said Burke. The exclusive in 
fashionable life does not see that he excludes him- 
self from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it. 
The exclusionist in religion does not see that he 
shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to 
shut out others. Treat men as pawns and ninepins, 
and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave 
out their heart, you shall lose your own. The 
senses would make things of all persons ; of women, 
of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, “ I 
will get it from his purse or get it from his skin,” is 
sound philosophy. 

All infractions of love and equity in our social re- 
lations are speedily punished. They are punished 
by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my 
fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. 
We meet as water meets water, or as two currents 
of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration 
of nature. But as soon as there is any departure 
from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for 
me that is not good for him, my neighbour feels the 
wrong ; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk 
from him ; his eyes no longer seek mine ; there is 
war between us ; there is hate in him and fear in me 


100 


ESSAY III. 


All the old abuses in society, universal and par 
ticular, all unjust accumulations of property and 
power, are avenged in the same manner, b ear is an 
instructer of great sagacity, and the herald ol all 
revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is 
rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, 
and though you see not well what he hovers for, 
there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, 
our laws are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. 
Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered 
over government and property. That obscene bird 
is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs 
which must be revised. 

Of the like nature is that expectation of change 
which instantly follows the suspension of our volunta- 
ry activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the eme- 
rald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the instinct 
which leads every generous soul to impose on itself 
tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are 
the tremblings of the balance of justice through the 
heart and mind of man. 

Experienced men of the world know very well 
that it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, 
and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. 
The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man 
gained any thing who has received a hundred favors 
and rendered none ? Has he gained by borrowing, 
through indolence or cunning, his neighbour’s wares, 


COMPENSATION. 


101 


or norses, or money ? There arises on the deed the 
instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part, 
and of debt on the other ; that is, of superiority and 
inferiority. The transaction remains in the memory 
of himself and his neighbour ; and every new trans- 
action alters, according to its nature, their relation to 
eacli other. He may soon come to see that he had 
belter have broken his own bones than to have 
ridden in his neighbour’s coach, and that “ the 
highest price lie can pay for a thing is to ask for 
it.” 

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of 
life, and know that it is the part of prudence to face 
every claimant, and pay every just demand on your 
time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay ; for, 
first or last, you must pay your entire debt. Per- 
sons and events may stand for a time between you 
and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must 
pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you 
will dread a prosperity which only loads you with 
more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every 
benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is 
great w r ho confers the most benefits. He is base 
— and that is the one base thing in the universe — 
to receive favors and render none. In the order of 
nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom 
we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit 
we receive must be rendered again, line for line, 


102 


ESSAY III. 


deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware 
of too much good staying in your band. It will fast 
corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in 
some sort. 

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. 
Cheapest, say the prudent, is the dearest labor. 
What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, 
is some application of good sense to a common want. 
It is best to pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to 
buy good sense applied to gardening ; in your sailor, 
good sense applied to navigation ; in the house, good 
sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving ; in your 
agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs. 
So do you multiply your presence, or spread your- 
self throughout your estate. But because of the du- 
al constitution of things, in labor as in life there can 
be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The 
swindler swindles himself. For the real price of la- 
bor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and 
credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, 
may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they 
represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be 
counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor can- 
not be answered but by real exertions of the mind, 
and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the 
defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge 
of material and moral nature which his honest care 
and pains yield to the operative. The law of 


COMPENSATION. 


103 


nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the 
power : but they who do not the thing have not the 
power. 

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharp- 
ening of a stake to the construction of a city or an 
epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect com- 
pensation of the universe. The absolute balance of 
Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its 
price, — and if that price is not paid, not that thing 
but something else is obtained, and that it is impossi- 
ble to get any thing without its price, — is not less 
sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets 
of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the 
action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that 
the high laws which each man sees implicated in those 
processes with which he is conversant, the stern eth- 
ics which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are meas- 
ured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand as 
manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the his- 
tory of a state, — do recommend to him his trade, 
and though seldom named, exalt his business to his 
imagination. 

The league between virtue and nature engages all 
things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beau- 
tiful laws and .substances of the world persecute and 
whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged 
for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide 
world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the 


104 


ESSAY III. 


earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it 
seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such 
as rev r eals in the woods the track of every partridge 
and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall 
the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, 
you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no in- 
let or clew. Some damning circumstance always 
transpires. The laws and substances of nature — 
water, snow, wind, gravitation — become penalties t r 
the thief 

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sure 
ness for all right action. Love, and you shall be 
loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as, 
the two sides of an algebraic equation. The goou 
man has absolute good, which like fire turns every 
thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him 
any harm ; but as the royal armies sent against Na 
poleon, when he approached, cast down their color? 
and from enemies became friends, so disasters c / 
all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove bene 
factors : — 

“ Winds blow and waters roll. 

Strength to the brave, and power and deity, 

Yet in themselves are nothing.” 

The good are befriended even by weakness anc 
defect. As no man had ever a point of pride lha\ 
was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a de- 
fect that was not somewhere made useful to ram. 
The stag in the fable adruired his horns and blunge] 


COMPENSATION. 


105 


his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved 
him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns 
destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to 
thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands 
a truth until he has contended against it, so no man 
has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or 
talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, 
and seen the triumph of the other over his own want 
of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits 
him to live in society ? Thereby he is driven to en- 
tertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help ; 
and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell 
with pearl. 

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The 
indignation which arms itself with secret forces does 
not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely 
assailed. A great man is always willing to be little. 
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes 
to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, 
he has a chance to learn something ; he has been put 
on his wits, on his manhood ; he has gained facts ; 
learns his ignorance ; is cured of the insanity of 
conceit ; has got moderation and real skill. The 
wise man throws himself on the side of his assail- 
ants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find 
his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls ofF 
from him like a dead skin, and when they would tri- 
umph, lo ! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame 


106 


ESR.AY II J 


*s safer than praise. I hate to lx defended in a 
newspaper. As long as all that i said is said 
against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. 
But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken 
for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before 
his enemies. In general, every evil to which we do 
not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich 
Islander believes that the strength and valor of the 
enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain 
the strength of the temptation we resist. 

The same guards which protect us from disaster, 
defect, and enmity, defend us, if we will, from self- 
ishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are not the best 
of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a 
mark of wisdom. Men suffer all their life long, 
under the foolish superstition that they can be cheat- 
ed. But it is as impossible for a man to be cheated 
by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not 
to be at the same time. There is a third silent par- 
ty to all our bargains. The nature and soul of 
things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment 
of every contract, so that honest service cannot 
come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, 
serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Ev- 
ery stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment 
s withholden, the better for you ; for compound in- 
terest on compound interest is the rate and usage ot 
this exchequer. 


COMPENSATION. 


107 

The history of persecution is a history of en- 
deavours to cheat nature, to make water run up 
hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no differ- 
ence whether the actors he many or one, a tyrant 
or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies volun- 
tarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing 
its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending 
to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activi- 
ty is night. Its actions are insane like its whole 
constitution. It persecutes a principle ; it would 
whip a right ; it would tar and feather justice, by 
inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and per- 
sons of those who have these. It resembles the 
prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out 
the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate 
spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The 
martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is 
a tongue of fame ; every prison, a more illustrious 
abode ; every burned book or house enlightens the 
world ; every suppressed or expunged word reverber- 
ates through the earth from side to side. Hours of 
sanity and consideration are always arriving to com- 
munities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen, 
and the martyrs are justified. 

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of cir- 
cumstances. The man is all. Every thing has twe 
sides, a good and an evil Everv advantage has it? 


108 


ESSAY III. 


tax. 1 learn to be content. But the doctrine of 
compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. Thfl 
thoughtless say, on hearing these representations, — 
What boots it to do well ? there is one event to 
good and evil ; if I gain any good, I must pay for 
it ; if I lose any good, I gain some other ; all ac- 
tions are indifferent. 

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensa 
lion, to wit, its own nature. The soul is not a coin 
pcnsation, but a life. The soul is. Under all this 
running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and 
flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss 
of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, 
or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirma- 
tive, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallow- 
ing up all relations, parts, and times within itself. 
Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. 
Vice is the absence or departure of the same. 
Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great 
Night or shade, on which, as a background, the liv- 
ing universe paints itself forth ; but no fact is begot- 
ten by it ; it cannot work ; for it is not. It cannot 
work any good ; it cannot work any harm. It is 
harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be. 

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil 
acts, because the criminal adheres to his vice and 
contumacy, and does not come to a crisis or judg- 
ment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stun 


COMPENSATION. 


109 


ning confutation of his nonsense before men and an- 
gels. Has he therefore outwitted the law ? Inas- 
much as he carries the malignity and the lie with 
him, he so far deceases from nature. In some 
manner there will be a demonstration of the wrong 
to the understanding also ; but should we not see 
it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal 
account. 

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that 
the gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss. 
There is no penalty to virtue ; no penalty to wis- 
dom ; they are proper additions of being. In a 
virtuous action, I properly am ; in a virtuous act, 
I add to the world ; I plant into deserts conquered 
from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness 
receding’ on the limits of the horizon. There can 
be no excess to love ; none to knowledge ; none 
to beauty, when these attributes are considered in 
the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and al- 
ways affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism. 

His life is a progress, and not a station. His in- 
stinct is trust. Our instinct uses u more ” and 
u less ” in application to man, of the presence of 
the soul , and not of its absence ; the brave man is 
greater than the coward ; the true, the benevolent, 
the wise, is more a man, and not less, than the fool 
and knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue ; 
?or that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute 


110 


ESSAY III. 


existence, without any comparative. Material good 
has its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, 
has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it 
away. But all the good of nature is the soul’s, 
and may be had, if paid for in nature’s lawful 

coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head 

allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not 
earn, for example, to find a pot of buried gold, 

knowing that it brings with it new burdens. I do 

not wish more external goods, — neither possessions, 
nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is 
apparent ; the tax is certain. But there is no tax 
on the knowledge that the compensation exists, and 
that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein 
I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I contract 
the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the 
wisdom of St. Bernard, — “ Nothing can work me 
damage except myself ; the harm that I sustain I 
carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer 
but by my own fault.” 

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for 
the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of 
nature seems to be the distinction of More and Less. 
How can Less not feel the pain ; how not feel in- 
dignation or malevolence towards More ? Look at 
those who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and 
knows not well what to make of it. He almost 
shuns their eye ; he fears they will upbraid God 


COMPENSATION. 


Ill 


What should they do ? It seems a great injustice. 
But see the facts nearly, and these mountainous in- 
equalities vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun 
melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart anti soul 
of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mint 
ceases. His is mine. I am my brother, and my 
brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone 
by great neighbours, I can yet love ; I can still re- 
ceive ; arid l.e that loveth maketh his own the gran- 
deur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that 
my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the 
friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and 
envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to 
appropriate all things. Jesus and Shakspeare are 
fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and 
incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His 
virtue, — is not that mine ? His wit, — if it cannot 
be made mine, it is not wit. 

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. 
The changes which break up at short intervals the 
prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature 
whose law is growth. Every soul is oy this intrinsic 
necessity quitting its whole system of things, its 
friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell- 
fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, be** 
cause it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly 
forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of 
the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in 


112 


ESSAY III. 


some happier mind they are incessant, and all world- 
ly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming, 
as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through 
which the living form is seen, and not, as in most 
men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many 
dates, and of no settled character, in which the man 
is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and 
the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of 
yesterday. And such should be the outward biog- 
raphy of man in time, a putting off of dead circum- 
stances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by 
day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not 
advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine 
expansion, this growth comes by shocks. 

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let 
our angels go. We do not see that they only go 
out, that archangels may come in. We are idolaters 
of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the 
soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We 
do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival 
or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in 
the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread 
and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit 
can feed, cover, and nerve 11s again. We cannot 
again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But 
we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Al- 
mighty saith, 4 Up and onward for evermore ! * 
We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we 


COMPENSATION. 


113 


rely on the new ; and so we walk ever with revert- 
ed eyes, like those monsters who look backwards. 

And yet the compensations of calamity are made 
apparent to the understanding also, after long inter- 
vals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disap- 
pointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems 
at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the 
sure years reveal the deep remedial force that under- 
lies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, 
brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, 
somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or 
genius ; for it commonly operates revolutions in our 
way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of 
youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a 
wonted occupation, or a household, or style of liv- 
ing, and allows the formation of new ones more 
friendly to the growth of character. It permits or 
constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and 
the reception of new influences that prove of the 
first importance to the next years ; and the man or 
woman who would have remained a sunny garden- 
flower, with no room for its roots and too much sun- 
shine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the 
neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the 
forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighbour- 
hoods of men. 


8 




















































% 





















... 




























SPIRITUAL LAWS, 


The living Heaven thy prayers respect. 
House at once and architect, 

Quarrying man’s rejected hours, 

Builds therewith eternal towers ; 

Sole and self-commanded works, 

Fears not undermining days, 

Grows by decays, 

And, by the famous might that lurks 
In reaction and recoil, 

Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil ; 
Forging, through swart arms of Ofl'enoe^ 
The silver seat of Innocence. 


























ESSAY IV. 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


When the act of reflection takes place in the 
mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of 
thought, we discover that our life is embosomed 
in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume 
pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only 
things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and 
terrible, are comely, as they take their place in 
the pictures of memory. The river-bank, the 
weed at the water-side, the old house, the fool 
ish person, — however neglected in the passing, 
— have a grace in the past. Even the corpse 
that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn 
ornament to the house. The soul will not know 
either deformity or pain. If, in the hours of c.ear 
reason, we should speak the severest truth, we 
should say, that we had never made a sacrifice. 
In these hours the mind seems so great, that noth- 
ing can be taken from us that seems much. All 


118 


ESSAY IV. 


.oss, all pain, is particular ; the universe remains 
to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor ca- 
lamities abate our trust. No man ever stated his 
griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exagger- 
ation in the most patient and sorely ridden hack 
that ever was driven. For it is only the finite 
that has wrought and suffered ; the infinite lies 
stretched in smiling repose. 

The intellectual life may be kept clean and health- 
ful, if man will live the life of nature, and not im- 
port into his mind difficulties which are none of his. 
No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let 
him do and say what strictly belongs to him, and, 
though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not 
yield him any intellectual obstructions and doubts. 
Our young people are diseased with the theologi- 
cal problems of original sin, origin of evil, pre- 
destination, and the like. These never presented 
a practical difficulty to any man, — never darkened 
across any man’s road, who did not go out of his 
way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps, 
and measles, and whooping-coughs, and those who 
have not caught them cannot describe their health 
or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will not 
know these enemies. It is quite another thing 
that he should be able to give account of his faith, 
and expound to another the theory of his self-union 
and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet, with* 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


119 


out this self-knowledge, there may be a sylvan 
strength and integrity in that wh.vdi he is “A 
few strong instincts and a few plain rules ” suf- 
fice us. 

My will never gave the images in my mind the 
rank they now take. The regular course of stud- 
ies, the years of academical and professional ed- 
ucation, have not yielded me better facts than some 
idle books under the bench at the Latin School. 
What w r e do not call education is more precious 
than that which we call so. We form no guess, 
at the time of receiving a thought, of its compara- 
tive value. And education often wastes its effort 
in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnet- 
ism, which is sure to select what belongs to it. 

In like manner, our moral nature is vitiated by 
any interference of our will. People represent virtue 
as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs up- 
on their attainments, and the question is everywhere 
vexed, when a noble nature is commended, whether 
the man is not better who strives with temptation. 
But there is no merit in the matter. Either God 
is there, or he is not there. We love characters 
in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. 
The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, 
the better we like him. Timoleon’s victories are 
the best victories ; which ran and flowed like Ho- 
mer’s verses, Plutarch said. When we see a soul 


120 


ESSAY IV. 


whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as 
roses, we must thank God that such things can be 
and are, and not turn sourly on the angel, and say, 
< Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance 
to all his native devils.’ 

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of na- 
ture over will in all practical life. There is less 
intention in history than we ascribe to it. We im- 
pute deep-laid, far-sighted plans to Caesar and Na- 
poleon ; but the best of their power was in nature, 
not in them. Men of an extraordinary success, in 
their honest moments, have always sung, c Not un- 
to us, not unto us.’ According to the faith of their 
times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Des- 
tiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their 
parallelism to the course of thought, which found 
in them an unobstructed channel ; and the wonders 
of which they w r ere the visible conductors seemed 
to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate the 
galvanism ? It is even true that there was less in 
them on which they could reflect, than in another ; 
as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. 
That which externally seemed will and immovable- 
ness was willingness and self-annihilation. Could 
Slmkspeare give a theory of Shakspeare ? Could 
ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius con- 
vey to others any insight into his methods ? If he 
could communicate that secret, it would instantly 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


121 


lose its exaggerated value, blending with the day 
light and the vital energy the power to stand and 
to go. 

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observa- 
tions, that our life might be much easier and simpler 
than we make it ; that the world might be a happier 
place than it is ; that there is no need of struggles, 
convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the 
hands and the gnashing of the teeth ; that we mis- 
create our own evils. We interfere with the opti- 
mism of nature ; for, whenever we get this vantage- 
ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the pres- 
ent, we are able to discern that we are begirt with 
laws which execute themselves. 

The face of external nature teaches the same les- 
son. Nature will not have us fret and fume. She 
does not like our benevolence or our learning much 
better than she likes our frauds and wars. When 
we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the 
Abolition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, 
or the Transcendental club, into the fields and 
woods, she says to us, c So hot ? my little Sir. ’ 

We are full of mechanical actions. We must 
needs intermeddle, and have things in our own way, 
until the sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. 
Love should make joy ; but our benevolence is un- 
happy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and 
pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain 


122 


ESSAY IV. 


ourselves to please nobody. There are nature* 
ways of arriving at the same ends at which these 
aim, but do not arrive. Why should all virtue work 
in one and the same way ? Why should all give 
dollars ? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, 
and we do not think any good will come of it. We 
have not dollars ; merchants have ; let them give 
them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; 
women will sew ; laborers will lend a hand ; the 
children will bring flowers. And why drag this 
dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole 
Christendom ? It is natural and beautiful that child- 
hood should inquire, and maturity should teacn ; 
but it is time enough to answer questions when they 
are asked. Do not shut up the young people against 
their will in a pew, and force the children to ask 
them questions for an hour against their will. 

If we look wider, things are all alike ; laws, and 
letters, and creeds, and modes of living, seem a 
travestie of truth. Our society is encumbered by 
ponderous machinery, which resembles the endless 
aqueducts which the Romans built over hill and 
dale, and which are superseded by the discovery 
of the law that water rises to the level of its source. 
It is a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can 
leap over. It is a standing army, not so good as 
a peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly appointed 
empire, quite superfluous when town-meetings are 
found to answer just as well. 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


123 


Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always 
works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it 
falls. When the fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. 
The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The 
walking of man and all animals is a falling forward. 
All our manual labor and works of strength, as 
prying, splitting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are 
done by dint of continual falling, and the globe, 
earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever. 

The simplicity of the universe is very different 
from the simplicity of a machine. He who sees 
moral nature out and out, and thoroughly knows 
how knowledge is acquired and character formed, 
is a pedant. The simplicity of nature is not that 
which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. 
The last analysis can no wise be made. We judge 
of a man’s wisdom by his hope, knowing that the 
perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an 
immortal youth. The wild fertility of nature is 
felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations 
with our fluid consciousness. We pass in the 
world for sects and schools, for erudition and piety, 
and we are all the time jejune babes. One sees 
very w r ell how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man 
sees that he is that middle point, whereof every 
thing may be affirmed and denied with equal reason. 
He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is alto- 
gether ignorant. He hears and feels what you say 


124 


ESSAY IV. 


of the seraphim, and of the tin-pedler. There ia 
no permanent wise man, except in the figment of 
the Stoics. We side with the hero, as we read 
or paint, against the coward and the robber ; but 
we have been ourselves that coward and robber, 
and shall be again, not in the low circumstance, 
but in comparison with the grandeurs possible to 
the soul. 

A little consideration of what takes place around 
us every day would show us, that a higher law 
than that of our will regulates events ; that our 
painful labors are unnecessary, and fruitless ; that 
only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are 
w r e strong, and by contenting ourselves with obe- 
dience we become divine. Belief and love, — a 
believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. 
O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at 
the centre of nature, and over the will of every 
man, so that none of us can wrong the universe. 
It has so infused its strong enchantment into nature, 
that we prosper when we accept its advice, and 
when we struggle to wound its creatures, our hands 
are glued to our sides, or they beat our own breasts. 
The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. 
We need only obey. There is guidance for each 
of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right 
word. Why need you choose so painfully your 
place, and occupation, and associates, and modes 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


125 


of action, and of entertainment ? Certainly there 
is a possible right for you that precludes the need 
}f balance and wilful election. For you there is 
a reality , a fit place and congenial duties. Place 
yourself in the middle of the stream of power and 
wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you 
are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and 
a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsay- 
ers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the 
measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will 
not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, 
the work, the society, letters, arts, science, reli- 
gion of men would go on far better than now, 
and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the 
world, and still predicted from the bottom of the 
heart, would organize itself, as do now the rose, 
and the air, and the sun. 

I say, do not choose ; but that is a figure of 
speech by which I would distinguish what is com- 
monly called choice among men, and which is a 
partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, 
of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man. 
But that which I call right or goodness is the 
choice of my constitution ; and that which I call 
heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the state or 
circumstance desirable to my constitution ; and the 
action which I in all my years tend to do, is the 
p,ork for my faculties. We must hold a man ante* 


126 


ESSAY IV. 


nable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or 
profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his 
deeds, that they are the custom of his trade. hat 
business has he with an evil trade t Has lie not a 
calling in his character. 

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is 
the call. There is one direction in which all space 
is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting 
li'm thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship 
in a river ; he runs against obstructions on every side 
hut one ; on that side all obstruction is taken away, 
and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel 
into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend 
on his organization, or the mode in which the general 
soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do 
something which is easy to him, and good when it 
is done, hut which no other man can do. He has 
no rival. For the more truly he consults his own 
powers, the more difference will his work exhibit 
from the work of any other. His ambition is ex- 
actly proportioned to his powers. The height of 
the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the 
base. Every man has this call of the power to do 
somewhat unique, and no man has any other call. 
The pretence that he has another call, a summons 
by name and personal election and outward “signs 
that mark him extraordinary, and not in the roll of 
*,ommon men,” is fanaticism, and betrays obtuse* 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


12”, 

ness to perceive that there is one mind in all the 
individuals, and no respect of persons therein. 

By doing his work, he makes the need felt which 
he can supply, and creates the taste by which he 
is enjoyed. By doing his own work, he unfolds 
h’mself. It is the vice of our public speaking that 
it has not abandonment. Somewhere, not only 
every orator but every man should let out all the 
length of all the reins ; should find or make a frank 
and hearty expression of what force and meaning is 
in him. The common experience is, that the man 
fils himself as well as he can to the customary de- 
tails of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it 
as a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the 
machine he moves ; the man is lost. Until he can 
manage to communicate himself to others in his full 
stature and proportion, he does not yet find his voca- 
tion. He must find in that an outlet for his charac- 
ter, so that he may justify his work to their eyes. 
If the labor is mean, let him by his thinking and 
character make it liberal. Whatever he knows and 
thinks, whatever in his apprehension is worth doing, 
that let him communicate, or men will never know 
and honor him aright. Foolish, whenever you take 
the meanness and formality of that thing you do, in- 
stead of converting it into the obedient spiracle of 
your character and aims. 

We like only such actions as have already long 


128 


ESSAY 1\. 


had the praise of men, and do not perceive that any 
thing man can do may be divinely done. We think 
greatness entailed or organized in some places or 
duties, in certain offices or occasions, and do not see 
that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and 
Eulenstein from a jews-harp, and a nimble-fingered 
lad out of shreds of paper with his scis-ors, and 
Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pit- 
iful habitation and company in which he was hid- 
den. What we call obscure condition or vulgar 
society is that condition and society whose poe- 
try is not yet written, but which you shall presently 
make as enviable and renowned as any. In our 
estimates, let us take a lesson from kings. The 
parts of hospitality, the connection of families, the 
impressiveness of death, and a thousand other things, 
royalty makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind 
will. To make habitually a new estimate, — that is 
elevation. 

What a man does, that he has. What has he to 
do with hope or fear ? In himself is his might. 
Let him regard no good as solid, but that which 
is in his nature, and which must grow out of him 
as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may 
come and go like summer leaves ; let him scatter 
them on every wind as the momentary signs of his 
infinite productiveness. 

He may have his own. A man’s genius, the 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


120 


quality that differences him from every other, the 
susceptibility to one class of influences, the se- 
lection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what 
is unfit, determines for him the character of the 
universe. A man is a method, a progressive ar- 
rangement ; a selecting principle, gathering his like 
to him, wherever he goes. He takes only his own 
out of the multiplicity that sw T eeps and circles round 
him. He is like one of those booms which are set 
out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, 
or like the loadstone amongst splinters of steel. 
Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his 
memory without his being able to say why, remain, 
because they have a relation to him not less real for 
being as yet unapprehended. They are symbols of 
value to him, as they can interpret parts of his con- 
sciousness which he would vainly seek words for in 
the conventional images of books and other minds. 
What attracts my attention shall have it, as I will 
go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a 
thousand persons, as worthy, go by it, to whom 
I give no regard. It is enough that these par- 
ticulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few 
traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, 
nave an emphasis in your memory out of all pro- 
poition to their apparent significance, if you meas- 
ure them by the ordinary standards. They relate 
to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do 
9 


130 


ESSAY IV. 


not reject them, and cast about for illustration and 
facts more usual in literature. What your heart 
thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is al- 
ways right. 

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and 
genius, the man has the highest right. Everywhere 
he may take what belongs to his spiritual estate, nor 
can he take any thing else, though all doors were 
open, nor can all the force of men hinder him from 
taking so much. It is vain to attempt to keep a se- 
cret from one who has a right to know it. It will 
tell itself. That mood into which a friend can 
bring us is his dominion over us. To the thoughts 
of that state of mind he has a right. All the se- 
crets of that state of mind he can compel. This 
is a law which statesmen use in practice. All the 
terrors of the French Republic, which held Austria 
in awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. 
But Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one 
of the old noblesse, with the morals, manners, and 
name of that interest, saying, that it was indispensa- 
ble to send to the old aristocracy of Europe men 
of the same connection, which, in fact, constitutes a 
sort of free-masonry. M. de Narbonne, in less than 
a fortnight, penetrated all the secrets of the imperial 
cabinet. 

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be un- 
derstood. Yet a man may come to find that the 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


131 


strongest of defences and of ties, — that he has been 
understood ; and he who has received an opinion 
may come to find it the most inconvenient of bonds. 

11 a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to 
conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated 
into that as into any which he publishes. If you 
pour water into a vessel twisted into coils and 
angles, it is vain to say, I will pour it only into this 
or that ; — it will find its level in all. Men feel and 
act the consequences of your doctrine, without being 
able to show how they follow. Show us an arc of 
the curve, and a good mathematician will find out the 
whole figure. We are always reasoning from the 
seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect intelli- 
gence that subsists between wise men of remote 
ages. A man cannot bury his meanings so deep 
in his book, but time and like-minded men will 
find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he : 
What secret can he conceal from the eyes of 
Bacon ? of Montaigne ? of Kant ? Therefore, 
Aristotle said of his works, u They are publish- 
ed and not published. ” 

No man can learn what he has not prepara- 
tion for learning, however near to his eyes is the 
ooject. A chemist may tell his most precious se- 
crets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the 
wiser, — the secrets he would not utter to a chem- 
ist for an estate. God screens us evermore from 


132 


ESSAY IV. 


premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we can- 
not see things that stare us in the face, until the hour 
arrives when the mind is ripened ; then we behold 
them, and the time when we saw them not is like 
a dream. 

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and 
worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is 
indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride. 
“Earth fills her lap with splendors” not her oicn. 
The vale of Tempe, Tivoli, and Rome are earth 
and water, rocks and sky. There are as good 
earth and water in a thousand places, yet how un- 
affecting ! 

People are not the better for the sun and moon, 
the horizon and the trees ; as it is not observed that 
the keepers of Roman galleries, or the valets of 
painters, have any elevation of thought, or that li- 
brarians are wiser men than others. There are 
graces in the demeanour of a polished and noble 
person, which are lost upon the eye of a churl. 
These are like the stars whose light has not yet 
reached us. 

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are 
the sequel of our waking knowledge. The visions 
of the night bear some proportion to the visions of 
the day. Hideous dreams are exaggerations of 
the sins of the day. We see our evil affections 
embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps, 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


133 


the traveller sometimes beholds his own shadow 
magnified to a giant, so that every gesture of his 
hand is terrific. “ My children,” said an old man 
to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, 
<c my children, you will never see any thing worse 
than yourselves.” As in dreams, so in the scarcely 
less fluid events of the world, every man sees him* 
self in colossal, without knowing that it is himself. 
The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is as 
his own good to his own evil. Every quality of his 
mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, and 
every emotion of his heart in some one. He is 
like a quincunx of trees, which counts five, east, 
west, north, or south ; or, an initial, medial, and 
terminal acrostic. And why not ? He cleaves to 
one person, and avoids another, according to their 
likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking him- 
self in his associates, and moreover in his trade, and 
habits, and, gestures, and meats, and drinks ; and 
comes at last to be faithfully represented by every 
view you take of his circumstances. 

He may read what he writes. What can we see 
or acquire, but what we are ? You have observed a 
skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a 
thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the 
book into your two hands, and read your eyes out ; 
you will never find what I find. If any ingenious 
reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or 


134 


ESSAY IV. 


delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is 
Englished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pclews’ 
tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good 
company. Introduce a base person among gen- 
tlemen ; it is all to no purpose ; he is not their 
fellow. Every society protects itself. The com- 
pany is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, 
though his body is in the room. 

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of 
mind, which adjust the relation of all persons to 
each other, by the mathematical measure of their 
havings and beings ? Gertrude is enamoured of 
Guy ; how high, how aristocratic, how Roman his 
mien and manners ! to live with him were life in- 
deed, and no purchase is too great ; and heaven 
and earth are moved to that end. Well, Gertrude 
has Guy ; but what now avails how high, how 
aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners, 
if his heart and aims are in the senate, in the theatre, 
and in the billiard-room, and she has no aims, no 
conversation, that can enchant her graceful lord ? 

He shall have his own society. We can love 
nothing but nature. The most wonderful talents, 
the most meritorious exertions, really avail very 
little with us ; but nearness or likeness of nature, — 
bow beautiful is the ease of its victory ! Persons 
approach us famous for their beauty, for their ac- 
complishments, worthy of all wonder for their 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


135 


charms and gifts ; they dedicate their whole skill 
to the hour and the company, with very imperfect 
result. To be sure, it would be ungrateful in us 
not to praise them loudly. Then, when all is 
done, a person of related mind, a brother or sister 
by nature, comes to us so softly and easily, so 
nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood in 
our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was 
gone, instead of another having come ; we are 
utterly relieved and refreshed ; it is a sort of joyful 
solitude. We foolishly think in our days of sin, 
that we must court friends by compliance to the 
customs of society, to its dress, its breeding, and 
its estimates. But only that soul can be my friend 
which I encounter on the line of my own march, 
that soul to which I do not decline, and which 
does not decline to me, but, native of the same 
celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experi- 
ence. The scholar forgets himself, and apes the 
customs and costumes of the man of the world, 
to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows some 
giddy girl, not yet taught by religious passion to 
know the noble woman with all that is serene, orac- 
ular, and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great, 
and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply 
punished than the neglect of the affinities by which 
alone society should be formed, and the insane levity 
of choosing associates by others’ eyes. 


136 


ESSAY 1Y. 


He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy 
of all acceptation, that a man may have that ah 
lowance he takes. Take the place and attitude 
whidt belong to you, and all men acquiesce. The 
woild must be just. It leaves every man, with 
profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero 
or driveller, it meddles not in the matter. It will 
certainly accept your own measure of your doing 
and being, whether you sneak about and deny your 
own name, or whether you see your work produced 
to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the 
revolution of the stars. 

The same reality pervades all teaching. The 
man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If 
he can communicate himself, he can teach, but not 
by words. He teaches who gives, and he learns 
who receives. There is no teaching until the pupil 
is brought into the same state or principle in which 
you are ; a transfusion takes place ; he is you, ana 
you are he ; then is a teaching ; ahd by no unfriend- 
ly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose 
the benefit. But your propositions run out of one 
ear as they ran in at the other. We see it adver- 
tised that Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the 
Fourth ol July, and Mr. Hand before the Mechan- 
ics’ Association, and we do not go thither, because 
vve know that these gentlemen will not communi- 
cate their own character and experience to the com- 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


1 A 

pany. If we had reason to expect such a con- 
fidence, we should go through all inconvenience 
and opposition. The sick would be carried in lit- 
ters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non- 
committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communica- 
tion, not a speech, not a man. 

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual 
works. We have yet to learn, that the thing uttered 
in words is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm 
itself, or no forms of logic or of oath can give it 
evidence. The sentence must also contain its own 
apology for being spoken. 

The effect of any writing on the public mind 
is mathematically measurable by its depth of thought. 
How much water does it draw ? If it awaken you 
to think, if it lift you from your feet with the great 
voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, 
slow, permanent, over the minds of men ; if the 
pages instruct you not, they will die like flies in 
the hour. The way to speak and write what shall 
not go out of fashion is, to speak and write sin- 
cerely. The argument which has not power to 
reach my own practice, I may well doubt, will 
fail to reach yours. But take Sidney’s maxim : — 
“ Look in thy heart, and write.” He that writes 
to himself writes to an eternal public. That state- 
ment only is fit to be made public, which you have 
jome at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity 


\38 *• SSAY IV. 

The writer who taWs his subject from his ear, and 
rsA. from his heart should know that he has lost 
f's much as he .^ems to have gained, and when 
'he empty 000V has gatliered all its praise, and 
half the people ??y, c What poetry ! what genius ! 9 
>t still neccis fool to make fire. That only profits 
which is profitable. Life alone can impart life ; 
and though we should burst, we can only be val- 
ued as we make ourselves valuable. There is no 
luck m Ihrrary reputation. They who make up 
the final verdict upon every book are not the par- 
tial and rcisy readers of the hour when it appears ; 
but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, 
not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, de- 
cides upon every man’s title to fame. Only those 
books come down which deserve to last. Gilt 
edges, vellum, and morocco, and presentation-copies 
to all the libraries, will not preserve a book in cir- 
culation beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with 
all Walpole’s Noble and Royal Authors to its fate 
dlackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok may endure for a 
aight, but Moses and Homer stand for ever. There 
ure not in the world at any one time more than 
n dozen persons who read and understand Plato : — 
never enough to pay for an edition of his works ; 
yet to every generation these come duly down, 
for the sake of those few persons, as if God 
brought them in his hand. “ No book,” said Bent- 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


139 * 


ey, u was ever written down by any but itself.” 
The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort 
friendly or hostile, but by their own specific grav- 
ity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to 
the constant mind of man. “ Do not trouble your- 
self too much about the light on your stat te,” said 
Michel Angelo to the young sculptor ; “ ,he light 
of the public square will test its value.” 

In like manner the effect of every actior. .s meas- 
ured by the depth of the sentiment from which it 
proceeds. The great man knew not that he was 
great. It took a century or two for that fact to 
appear. What he did, he did because he must ; 
it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew 
out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, 
every thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger 
or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is 
called an institution. 

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars 
of the genius of nature ; they show the direction of 
the stream. But the stream is blood ; every drop i« 
alive. Truth has not single victories ; all things are 
its organs, — not only dust and stones, but errors 
and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say. are 
as beautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy is 
affirmative, and readily accepts the testimony of ncg* 
ative facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By 
a divine necessity, every fact in nature is constrained 
to offer its testimony. 


140 


ESSAY IV. 


Human character evermore nubh«lws itself. The 
most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a 
thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. 
If you act, you show character ; if you sit still, if 
you deep, you show it. You think, because you 
have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have 
given no opinion on the times, on the church, on 
slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret socie- 
ties, on the college, on parties and persons, that your 
verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved 
wisdom. Far otherwise ; your silence answers very 
loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow- 
men have learned that you cannot help them ; for, 
oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and under- 
standing put forth her voice ? 

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of 
dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling 
members of the body. Faces never lie, it is said. 
No man need be deceived, who will study the 
changes of expression. When a man speaks the 
truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the 
heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks false 
ly, the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint. 

I have heard an experienced counsellor say, that 
he never feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer 
who does not believe in his heart that his client ought 
to have a verdict. If he does not believe it, his un- 
belief will appear to the jury, despite all his protesta- 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


141 


tions, and will become their unbelief. Phis is that 
law whereby a work of art, of whatever kind, sets us 
in the same mate of mind wherein the artist was 
when he made it. That which we do not believe, 
we cannot adequately say, though we may repeat the 
words never so often. It was this conviction which 
Swedenborg expressed, when he described a group 
of persons in the spiritual world endeavouring in vain 
to articulate a proposition which they did not believe; 
but they could not, though they twisted and folded 
their lips even to indignation. 

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is 
all curiosity concerning other people’s estimate of us, 
and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so. If 
a man know that he can do any thing, — that he can 
do it better than any one else, — he has a pledge of 
the acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. 
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every 
assembly that a man enters, in every action he at 
tempts, he is gauged and stamped. In every troop 
of boys that whoop and run in each yard and square, 
a new-comer is as well and accurately weighed in the 
course of a few days, and stamped with his right 
number, as if he had undergone a formal trial of his 
strength, speed, and temper. A stranger comes 
from a distant school, with better dress, with trinkets 
in his pockets, with airs and pretensions : an older 
boy says to himself, ‘ It ’s of no use ; we shall find 


142 


ESSAY IV. 


him out to-morrow.’ ‘ What has he done ? ’ is the 
divine question which searches men, and transpierces 
every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair 
of the world, nor be distinguished for his hour from 
Homer and Washington ; but there need never be 
any doubt concerning the respective ability of human 
beings. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. 
Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. 
Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back 
Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished 
slavery. 

As much virtue as there is, so much appears ; as 
much goodness as there is, so much reverence it 
commands. All the devils respect virtue. The 
high, the generous, the self-devoted sect will always 
instruct and command mankind. Never was a sin- 
cere word utterly lost. Never a magnanimity fell to 
the ground, but there is some heart to greet and ac- 
cept it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is 
worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his 
form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Conceal- 
ment avails him nothing ; boasting nothing. There is 
confession in the glances of our eyes ; in our smiles ; 
in salutations ; and the grasp of hands. His sin 
Dedaubs him, mars all his good impression. Men 
know not why they do not trust him ; but they do 
not trust him. His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines 
of mean expression in his cheek, pinches the nose. 


SPIRITTTAT, LAWS. 


143 


rets the mark of the beast or* ihe back of the head, 
? nd writes O fool ! fool ! on the forehead of a king. 

If you would not be known to do a:.iy thing, never 
do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a 
desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. 
He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot beep his 
foolish counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish 
look, ungenerous acts, and the want of due knovvl 
edge, — all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an 
Iachimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul ? Confucius 
exclaimed, — u How can a man be concealed ! 
How can a man be concealed ! ” 

On the other hand, the hero fears not, that, if he 
withhold the avowal of a just and brave act, it will 
go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, — him- 
self, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace, 
and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the end 
a better proclamation of it than the relating of the 
incident. Virtue is the adherence in action to the 
nature of things, and the nature of things makes it 
prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitution of 
being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God is 
described as saying, I AM. 

The lesson which these observations convey is, 
Be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take 
our bleated nothingness out of the path of the divine 
circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world 
Let us lie low in the Lord’s power, and learn that 
truth alone makes rich and great. 


144 


ESSAY IV. 


If you visit your friend, why need you apologize 
for not having visited him, and waste his time and 
deface your own act ? Visit him now. Let him feel 
that the highest love has come to see him, in thee, its 
lowest organ. Or why need you torment yourself 
and friend by secret self-reproaches that you have 
not assisted him or complimented him with gifts and 
salutations heretofore ? Be a gift and a benediction. 
Shine with real light, and not with the borrowed re* 
flection of gifts. Common men are apologies for 
men ; they bow the head, excuse themselves with 
prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances, because 
the substance is not. 

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the 
worship of magnitude. We call the poet inactive, 
because he is not a president, a merchant, or a por- 
ter. We adore an institution, and do not see that it 
is founded on a thought which we have. But real 
action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life 
are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, 
our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the 
like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we 
walk ; in a thought which revises our entire manner 
of life, and savs, — ‘ Thus hast thou done, but it 
were better thus.’ And all our after years, like 
menials, serve and wait on this, and, according to 
their ability, execute its will. This revisal or cor- 
rection is a constant force, which, as a tendency, 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


1 45 


reaches through our lifetime. The object of the 
man, the aim of these moments, is to make daylight 
shine through him, to suffer the law to traverse his 
whole being without obstruction, so that, on what 
point soever of his doing your eye falls, it shall re- 
port truly of his character, whether it be his diet, his 
nouse, his religious forms, his society, his mirth, his 
vote, his opposition. Now he is not homogeneou; , 
but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse , 
there are no thorough lights : but the eye of th<a 
beholder is puzzled, detecting many unlike tenden- 
cies, and a life not yet at one. 

Why should we make it a point with our fai*e 
modesty to disparage that man we are, and that form 
of being assigned to us ? A good man is contented. 
I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to 
be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the 
world of this hour, than the world of his hour. Nor 
can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasi- 
ness by saying, c He acted, and thou sittest still. ’ I 
see action to be good, when the need is, and sitting 
still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the 
man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and 
peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, 
and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. 
Why should we be busy bodies and superservice- 
able ? Action and inaction are alike to the true. 
One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock, and 
10 


146 


ESSAY IV. 


one for the sleeper of a bridge ; the virtue of the 
wood is apparent in both. 

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that T 
am here certainly shows me that the soul had need 
of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post ? 
Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unsea- 
sonable apologies and vain modesty, and imagine 
iny being here impertinent ? less pertinent than 
Epaminondas or Homer being there ? and that 
the soul did not know its own needs ? Besides, 
without any reasoning on the matter, I have no 
discontent. The good soul nourishes me, and un- 
locks new magazines of power and enjoyment to 
me every day. I will not meanly decline the im- 
mensity of good, because I have heard that it has 
come to others in another shape. 

Besides, why should w r e be cowed by the name 
of Action ? 5 T is a trick of the senses, — no 
more. We know that the ancestor of every action 
is a thought. The poor mind does not seem to it- 
self to be any thing, unless it have an outside badge, 
— some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic 
prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great 
donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild 
contrasting action to testify that it is somewhat. The 
rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. 
To think is to act. 

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


147 


own so. All action is of an infinite elasticity, and 
tne least admits of being inflated with the celestial 
air until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek 
one peace by fidelity. Let me heed my duties. 
Why need I go gadding into the scenes and philos- 
ophy of Greek and Italian history, before I have 
justified myself to my benefactors ? How dare I 
read Washington’s campaigns, when I have not an- 
swered the letters of my own correspondents ? Is 
not that a just objection to much of our reading ? 
It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze 
after our neighbours. It is peeping. Byron says 
of Jack Bunting, — 

“He knew not what to say, and so he swore.’ 

I may say it of our preposterous use of books, — He 
knew not what to do, and so he read. 1 can think 
of nothing to fill my time with, and I find the Life 
of Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to 
pay to Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General 
Washington. My time should be as good as their 
lime, — my facts, my net of relations, as good as 
theirs, or either of theirs. Rather let me do my 
work so well that other idlers, if they choose, may 
compare my texture with the texture of those and 
find it identical with the best. 

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and 
Pericles, this under-estimate of our own, comes from 
a neglect of the fact of an identical nature. Bona 


148 


ESSAY IV. 


parte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one ana 
the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, 
the good poet, the good player. The poet uses the 
names of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Bel 
isarius ; the painter uses the conventional story ot 
the Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not, 
theiefore, defer to the nature of these accidental 
men, of these stock heroes. If the poet write a 
true drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player 
of Caesar ; then the selfsame strain of thought, 
emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions as swift, 
mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self- 
sufficing, dauntless, which on the waves of its love 
and hope can uplift all that is reckoned solid and 
precious in the world, — palaces, gardens, money, 
navies, kingdoms, — marking its own incomparable 
worth by the slight it casts on these gauds of 
men, — these all are his, and by the power of 
these he rouses the nations. Let a man believe 
in God, and not in names and places and persons. 
Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s 
form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or 
Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers and 
scour floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot be 
muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly 
appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and 
radiance of human life, and all people will get mops 
hnd brooms ; until, lo ! suddenly the great soul has 


SPIRITUAL LAWS. 


149 


enshrined itself in some other form, and done some 
other deed, and that is now the flower and head of 
all living nature. 

We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf 
and tinfoil that measure the accumulations of the 
subtle element. We know the authentic effects of 
the true fire through every one of its million dis- 
guises. 







































































LOVE. 


** 1 was as a gem concealed ; 

Me my burning ray revealed.” 

Koran . 












































































V * 




















































♦ 

















ESSAY V. 


LOVE. 


Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfil- 
ments ; each of its joys ripens into a new want. 
Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the 
first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a be- 
nevolence which shall lose all particular regards in 
its general light. The introduction to this felicity is 
in a private and tender relation of one to one, which 
is the enchantment of human life ; which, like a cer- 
tain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one 
period, and works a revolution in his mind and body ; 
unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic 
and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy 
into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens 
the imagination, adds to his character heroic and 
sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and gives per- 
manence to human society. 

The natural association of the sentiment of love 
with the heyday of the blood seems to require, that 


154 


ESSAY V. 


in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth 
and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing 
experience, one must not be too old. The delicious 
fancies of youth reject the least savour of a mature 
philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their 
purple bloom. And, therefore, I know I incur the 
imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from 
those who compose the Court and Parliament of 
Love. But from these formidable censors I shall 
appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered 
that this passion of which we speak, though it begin 
with the young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather 
suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow old, 
but makes the aged participators of it not less than 
the tender maiden, though in a different and nobler 
sort. For it is a fire that, kindling its firrt embers in 
the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a 
wandering spark out of another private heart, glows 
and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multi- 
tudes of men and women, upon the universal heart 
of all, and so lights up the whole world and all na- 
ture with its generous flames. It matters not, there- 
fore, whether we attempt to describe the passion at 
twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who 
paints it at the first period will lose some of its 
later, he who paints it at the last, some o r its 
earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that, by pa- 
tience and the Muses’ aid, we may attain to that 


LOVE. 


155 


inward view of the law, which shall describe a 
truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it 
shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle 
beholden. 

And the first condition is, that we must leave 
a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and 
study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not 
in history. For each man sees his own life defaced 
and disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his im- 
agination. Each man sees over his own experience 
a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men 
looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those 
delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, 
which have given him sincerest instruction and nour- 
ishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas ! I know 
not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in ma- 
ture life the remembrances of budding joy, and cover 
every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen 
from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all 
is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melan- 
choly ; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual 
world — the painful kingdom of time and place — 
dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, 
with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. 
Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to 
names, and persons, and the partial interests of to- 
day and yesterday. 

The strong bent of nature is seen in the propor- 


i56 


ESSAY V. 


tion which this topic of personal relations usurps 
in the conversation of society. What do we wish 
to know of any worthy person so much, as how 
he has sped in the history of this sentiment ? What 
books in the circulating libraries circulate ? How 
we glow over these novels of passion, when the 
story is told with any spark of truth and nature ’ 
And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of 
life, like any passage betraying affection between 
two parties ? Perhaps we never saw them before, 
and never shall meet them again. But we see them 
exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and 
we are no longer strangers. We understand them, 
and take the warmest interest in the development 
of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The 
earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness 
are nature’s most winning pictures. It is the dawn 
of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The 
rude village boy teases the girls about the school- 
house door ; — but to-day he comes running into the 
entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel ; 
he holds her books to help her, and instantly it 
seems to him as if she removed herself from him 
infinitely, and w r as a sacred precinct. Among the 
throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone 
distances him ; and these tw r o little neighbours, that 
were so close just now, have learned to respect 
each other’s personality. Or who can avert his 


LOVE. 


157 


eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways 
of school-girls who go into the country shops to 
buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk 
half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, 
good-natured shop-boy. In the village the?y are on 
a perfect equality, which love delights in, and with- 
out any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of 
woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls 
may have little beauty, yet plainly do they estab- 
lish between them and the good boy the most agree- 
able, confiding relations, what with their fun and 
their earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira, 
and who was invited to the party, and who danced 
at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school 
would begin, and other nothings concerning which 
the parties cooed. By and by that boy wants a 
wfife, and very truly and heartily will he know where 
to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk 
such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and 
great men. 

I have been told, that in some public discourses 
of mine my reverence for the intellect has made 
me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now 
I almost shrink at the remembrance of such dispar- 
aging words. For persons are love’s world, and the 
coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the 
young soul wandering here in nature to the power 
of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treason- 


158 


ESSAY V. 


able to nature, aught derogatory to the social in- 
stincts. For, though the celestial rapture falling out 
of heaven seizes only , upon those of tender age, 
and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or 
comparison, and putting us quite beside ourselves, 
we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the remem- 
brance of these visions outlasts all other remembran- 
ces, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. 
But here is a strange fact ; it may seem to many 
men, in revising their experience, that they have no 
fairer page in their life’s book than the delicious 
memory of some passages wherein affection con- 
trived to give a witchcraft surpassing the deep at- 
traction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental 
and trivial circumstances. In looking backward, 
they may find that several things which were not the 
charm have more reality to this groping memory 
than the charm itself which embalmed them. But 
be our experience in particulars what it may, no man 
ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart 
and brain, which created all things new ; which w r as 
the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art ; which 
made the face of nature radiant with purple light, 
the. morning and the night varied enchantments; 
when a single tone of one voice could make the 
heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance asso- 
ciated with one form is put in the amber of mem- 
ory ; when he became all eye when one was piesent, 


L0VB. 


159 


and all memory when one was gone ; when the 
youth becomes a watcher of windows, and studious 
of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a 
carriage ; when no place is too solitary, and none 
too silent, for him who has richer company and 
sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than any 
old friends, though best and purest, can give him ; 
for the figures, the motions, the words of the be- 
loved object are not like other images written in 
water, but, as Plutarch said, u enamelled in fire,” 
and make the study of midnight. 

“ Thou art not gone being gone, where’er thou art, 

Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him tiiy loving 

heart.” 

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at 
the recollection of days when happiness was not happy 
enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain 
and fear ; for he touched the secret of the matter, 
who said of love, — 

“ All other pleasures are not worth its pains ” ; 
and when the day was not long enough, but the night, 
too, must be consumed in keen recollections ; when 
the head boiled all night on the pillow with the gen- 
erous deed it resolved on ; when the moonlight was 
a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the 
flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song , 
when all business seemed an impertinence, and all 
tfie men and women running to and fro in the streets, 
mere pictures. 


160 


ESSAY V. 


The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It 
makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows 
conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree 
sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are 
almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks 
on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, 
and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent ; and 
he almost fears to trust them with the secret which 
they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympa- 
thizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home 
than with men. 

“ Fountain-heads and pathless groves, 

Places which pale passion loves, 

Moonlight walks, when all the fowls 
Are safely housed, save bats and owls, 

A midnight bell, a passing groan, — 

These are the sounds we feed upon.” 

Behold there in the wood the fine madman ! He 
is a palace of sweet sounds and sights ; he dilates ; 
he is twice a man ; he walks with arms akimbo ; he 
soliloquizes ; he accosts the grass and the trees ; he 
feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily 
in his veins ; and he talks with the brook that wets 
his foot. 

The heats that have opened his perceptions of 
natural beauty have made him love music and verse. 
It is a fact often observed, that men have written 
good verses under the inspiration of passion, who 
cannot write well under any other circumstances. 


LOVE. 


161 


The like force has the passion over all his nature. 
It expands the sentiment ; it makes the clown gentle, 
and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful 
and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy 
the world, so only it have the countenance of the be- 
loved object. In giving him to another, it still more 
gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new 
perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a relig- 
ious solemnity of character and aims. He does 
not longer appertain to his family and society ; he 
is somewhat ; he is a person ; he is a soul. 

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature 
of that influence which is thus potent over the human 
youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now 
celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to 
shine, which pleases everybody with it and with 
themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover 
cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and sol- 
itary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, 
informing loveliness is society for itself, and she 
teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with 
Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her ex- 
istence makes the world rich. Though she ex- 
trudes all other persons from his attention as cheap 
and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out 
her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, 
mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a 
representative of all select things and virtues. Foi 
11 


162 


ESSAY V. 


that reason, the lover never sees personal resemblan- 
ces in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His 
friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her 
sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover 
sees no resemblance except to summer evenings 
and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of 
oirds. 

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. 
Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances 
from one and another face and form ? We are 
touched with emotions of tenderness and compla- 
cency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emo- 
tion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed 
for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to or- 
ganization. Nor does it point to any relations of 
friendship or love known and described in society, 
but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattain- 
able sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and 
sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and fore- 
show. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is 
like opaline doves’-neck lustres, hovering and eva- 
nescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent 
things, which all have this rainbow character, defy- 
ing all attempts at appropriation and use. What 
else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said 
to music, u Away ! away ! thou speakest to me of 
things which in all my endless life I have not found, 
and shall not find.” The same fluency may be ob* 


LOVE. 


163 


served in every work of the plastie arts. The stat 
ue is then beautiful when it begins tc be incompre- 
hensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can 
no longer be defined by compass and measuring- 
wand, but demands an active imagination to go with 
it, and to say what it is in the act of doing. The 
god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in 
a transition from that which is representable to the 
senses, to that which is not. Then first it ceases to 
be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. 
And of poetry, the success is not attained when it 
lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires 
us with new endeavours after the unattainable. Con- 
cerning it, Landor inquires “ whether it is not to be 
referred to some purer state of sensation and ex- 
istence.” 

In like manner, personal beauty is then first 
charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with 
any end ; when it becomes a story without an 
end ; when it suggests gleams and visions, and 
not earthly satisfactions ; when it makes the be- 
holder feel his unworthiness ; when he cannot feel 
his right to it, though he were Caisar ; he cannot 
feel more right to it than to the firmament and the 
splendors of a sunset. 

Hence arose the saying, “If I love you, what is 
that to you ? ” We say so, because we feel that 
what we lov? is not in your will, but. above it. It 


164 


ESSAY V. 


is not you, but your radiance. It is that which yoifl 
know not in yourself, and can never know. 

This agrees well with that high philosophy of 
Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in ; for 
they said that the soul of man, embodied here on 
earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that 
other world of its own, out of which it came into 
this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the nat- 
ural sun, and unable to see any other objects than 
those of this world, which are but shadows of 
real things. Therefore, the Deity sends the glory 
of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of 
beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the 
celestial good and fair ; and the man beholding such 
a person in the female sex runs to her, and finds 
the highest joy in contemplating the form, move- 
ment, and intelligence of this person, because it 
suggests to him the presence of that which in- 
deed is within the beauty, and the cause of the 
beauty. 

If, however, from too much conversing with ma- 
terial objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its 
satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sor- 
row ; body being unable to fulfil the promise which 
beauty holds out ; but if, accepting the hint of these 
visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his 
mind, the soul passes through the body, and falls to 
admire strokes of character, and the lovers contem- 


LOVE. 


165 


plate one another in their discourses and their ac 
tions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, 
more and more inflame their love of it, and by this 
love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts 
oul the fire by shining on the hearth, they become 
pure and hallowed. By conversation with that 
which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, 
and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of 
these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. 
Then he passes from loving them in one to loving 
them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the 
door through which he enters to the society of all 
true and pure souls. In the particular society of his 
mate, he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any 
taint, which her beauty has contracted from this 
world, and is able to point it out, and this with 
mutual joy that they are now able, without offence, 
to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, 
and give to each all help and comfort in curing the 
same. And, beholding in many souls the traits of 
the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that 
which is divine from the taint which it has con- 
tracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest 
beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, 
by steps on this ladder of created souls. 

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us 
rf love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is 
it new. If Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius taught it, 


166 


ESSAY V. 


so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton. It awaits a 
truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that sub- 
terranean prudence which presides at marriages with 
words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one 
eye is prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest dis- 
course has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. 
Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the ed- 
ucation of young women, and withers the hope 
and affection of human nature, by teaching that 
marriage signifies nothing but a housewife’s thrift, 
and that woman’s life has no other aim. 

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only 
one scene in our play. In the procession of the 
soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles 
ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the 
light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the 
soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensM 
and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house, and 
yard, and passengers, on the circle of household 
acquaintance, on politics, and geography, and his- 
tory. But things are ever grouping themselves 
according to higher or more interior laws. Neigh- 
bourhood, size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by 
degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, 
real affinities, the longing for harmony between the 
soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing 
instinct, predominate later, and the step backward 
from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. 


LOVE. 


167 

Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, 
must become more impersonal every day. Of this 
at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and 
maiden who are glancing at each other across crowd- 
ed rooms, with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, 
of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from 
this new, quite external stimulus. The work of 
vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark 
and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they ad- 
vance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery 
passion, to plighting troth, and marriage. Passion 
beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is 
wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled. 

“Her pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, 

That one might almost say her body thought.” 

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to 
make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no 
other aim, asks no more, than Juliet, — than Romeo 
Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are 
all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul 
which is all form. The lovers delight in endear- 
ments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their 
regards. When alone, they solace themselves with 
the remembered image of the other. Does that 
other see the same star, the same melting cloud, 
read the same book, feel the same emotion, that 
now delight me ? They try and weigh their affec- 


168 


ESSAY V. 


tion, and, adding up costly advantages, friends, 
opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that 
willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for 
the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which 
shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on 
these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive 
to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes cove- 
nants with Eternal Power in behalf of this dear 
mate. The union which is thus effected, and which 
adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it 
transmutes every thread throughout the whole web 
of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in 
a new and sweeter element, is yet a temporary state. 
Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, 
nor even home in another heart, content the awful 
soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last 
from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the 
harness, and aspires to vast and universal aims. 
The soul which is in the soul of each, craving 
a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, 
and disproportion in the behaviour of the other. 
Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet 
that which drew T them to each other was signs of 
loveliness, signs of virtue ; and these virtues are 
there, however eclipsed. They appear and re- 
appear, and continue to attract ; but the regard 
changes, quits the sign, and attaches to the substance. 
This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as 


LOVE. 


i6y 

life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and 
combination of all possible positions of the parties, 
to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint 
each with the strength and weakness of the oth- 
er. For it is the nature and end of this relation, 
that they should represent the human race to each 
other. All* that is in the world, which is or ought to 
be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of 
man, of woman. 

“ The person love does to us fit, 

Like manna, lias the taste of all in it.” 

The world rolls ; the circumstances vary every 
hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the 
body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and 
vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If 
there be virtue, all the vices are known as such ; 
they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard 
is sobered by time in either breast, and, losing in 
violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thor- 
ough good understanding. They resign each other, 
without complaint, to the good offices which man 
and woman are severally appointed to discharge in 
time, and exchange the passion which once could 
not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disen- 
gaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of 
each other’s designs. At last they discover that 
ail which at first drew them together, — those once 
sacred features, that magical play of charms, — was 


170 


ESSAY V. 


deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffold- 
ing by which the house was built ; and the purifica 
tion of the intellect and the heart, from year to year, 
is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the 
first, and wholly above their consciousness. Look- 
ing at these aims with which two persons, a man and 
a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are 
shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society 
forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis 
with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early 
infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts 
deck the nuptial bower, and nature, and intellect, and 
art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody 
they bring to the epithalamium. 

Thus are we put in training for a love which 
knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which 
seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of 
increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature 
observers, and thereby learners. That is our per- 
manent state. But we are often made to feel that 
our affections are but tents of a night. Though 
slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections 
change, as tl.e objects of thought do. There are 
moments when the affections rule and absorb the 
man, and make his happiness dependent on a person 
or persons. But in health the mind is presently 
seen again, — its overarching vault, bright with gal- 
axies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and 


LOVE. 


171 


lears that swept over us as clouds, must lose their 
finite character and blend with God, to attain their 
own perfection. But we need not fear that we can 
lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The 
soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so 
beautiful and attractive as these relations must be 
succeeded and supplanted only by what is more 
beautiful, and so on for ever. 



























h It I E N JL> 8 h J v. 


A ruddy drop of manly blood 
The surging sea outweighs, 

The world uncertain comes and goes, 
The lover rooted stays. 

I fancied he was fled, 

And, after many a year, 

Glowed unexhausted kindliness 
Like daily sunrise there. 

My careful heart was free again, — 

O friend, my bosom said, 

Through thee alone the sky is arched, 
Through thee the rose is red, 

All things through thee take nobler form. 
And look beyond the earth, 

And is the mill-round of our fate 
A sun-path in thy worth. 

Me too thy nobleness has taught 
To master my despair ; 

The fountains of my hidden 1'fe 
Are through thy friendship fair 






* 








ESSAY VI. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


W e have a great deal more kindness than is ever 
spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like 
jast winds the world, the whole human family is 
bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. 
How many persons we meet in houses, whom we 
scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who 
honor us ! How many w r e see in the street, or sit 
with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly 
rejoice to be with ! Read the language of these 
wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth. 

The effect of the indulgence of this human affec- 
tion is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and 
in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and 
complacency which are felt towards others are lik- 
ened to the material effects of fire ; so swift, or 
much more swift, more active, more cheering, are 
these fine inward irradiations. From the highest 
degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of 
z< od-will. they make the sweetness of life. 


176 


ESSAY VI. 


Our intellectual and active powers increase with 
our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and 
all his years of meditation do not furnish him with 
one good thought or happy expression ; but it is ne- 
cessary to write a letter to a friend, — and, forthwith, 
troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every 
hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where 
virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which 
the approach of a stranger causes. A commended 
stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasi- 
ness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts 
of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to 
the good hearts that would welcome him. The 
house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the 
old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must 
get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended 
stranger, only the good report is told by others, 
only the good and new is heard by us. He stands 
to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having 
imagined and invested him, we ask how we should 
stand related in conversation and action with such a 
man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea ex- 
alts conversation with him. We talk better than we 
are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer 
memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for 
the time. For long hours we can continue a series 
of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn 
from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they 


FR .ENDSHIP. 


177 

who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, 
shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. 
But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his 
partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the con- 
versation, it is all over. He has neard the first, tno 
last and best he will ever hear from us He is 
no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misappre- 
hension are old acquaintances. Now, when he 
comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the 
dinner, — but the throbbing of the heart, and the 
communications of the soul, no more. 

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection 
which make a young world for me again ? What 
so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in 
a thought, in a feeling ? How beautiful, on their 
approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms 
of the gifted and the true ! The moment we indulge 
our affections, the earth is metamorphosed ; there is 
no winter, and no night ; all tragedies, all ennuis, van- 
ish, — all duties even ; nothing fills the proceeding 
eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. 
Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the uni- 
verse it should rejoin its friend, and it would be con- 
tent and cheerful alone for a thousand years. 

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for 
my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call 
Cod the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to 
tre in his gifts ? I chide society, I embrace solitude 
12 


178 


ESSAY VI. 


and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, 
the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to 
time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who un- 
derstands me, oecomes mine, — a possession for all 
time. Nor is nature so poor but she gives me this 
joy several times, and thus we weave social threads 
of our own, a new web of relations ; and, as many 
thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we 
shall by and by stand in a new world of our own 
creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a 
traditionary globe. My friends have come to me 
unsought. The great God gave them to me. By 
oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue witli it- 
self, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in 
me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls 
of individual character, relation, age, sex, circum- 
stance, at which he usually connives, and now makes 
many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lov- 
ers, who carry out the world for me to new and 
noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my 
thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard, 
— poetry without stop, — hymn, ode, and epic, poet- 
ry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. 
Will these, too, separate themselves from me again, 
or some of them ? I know not, but I fear it not ; for 
my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by sim- 
ple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus 
social, the same affinity will exert its energy or 


FRIENDSHIP. 


179 


whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, 
wherever I may be. 

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on 
this point. It is almost dangerous to me to “crush 
the sweet poison of misused wine ” of the affections. 
A new person is to me a great event, and hin- 
ders me from sleep. I have often had fine fan- 
cies about persons which have given me delicious 
hours ; but the joy ends in the day ; it yields no 
fruit. Thought is not born of it ; my action is very 
little modified. I must feel pride in my friend’s ac- 
complishments as if they were mine, — and a prop- 
erty in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is 
praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his 
engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience 
of our friend. His goodness seems better than our 
goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. 
Every thing that is his, — his name, his form, his 
dress, books, and instruments, — fancy enhances. Our 
own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. 

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not 
without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. 
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too 
good to be believed. The lover, beholding his 
maiden, half knows that she is not veiily that which 
he worships ; and in the golden hour of friendship, 
we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbe- 
lief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the vir« 


180 


ESSAY VI. 


tues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the 
form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabita- 
tion. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as 
it respects itself. In strict science all persons under- 
lie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall 
we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphys- 
ical foundation of this Elysian temple ? Shall I not 
be as real as the things I see ? If I am, I shall not 
fear to know them for what they are. Their essence 
is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it 
needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root 
of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for 
chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I 
must hazard the production of the bald fact amidst 
these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an 
Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands 
united with his thought conceives magnificently of 
himself. He is conscious of a universal success, 
even though bought by uniform particular failures. 
No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be 
any match for him. I cannot choose but rely on my 
own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot 
make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only 
the star dazzles ; the planet has a faint, moon-like 
ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts 
and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see 
well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like 
him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I 


FRIENDSHIP. 


181 


cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the 
Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and paint- 
ed immensity, — thee, also, compared with whom all 
.else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, 
as Justice is, — thou art not my soul, but a picture 
and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and 
already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not 
that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth 
leaves, and presently, by the germination of new 
buds, extrudes the old leaf ? The law of nature is 
alternation for evermore. Each electrical state su- 
perinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself 
with friends, that it may enter into a grander self- 
acquaintance or solitude ; and it goes alone for a 
season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. 
This method betrays itself along the whole history 
of our personal relations. The instinct of affection 
revives the hope of union with our mates, and the 
returning sense of insulation recalls us from the 
chase. Thus every man passes his life in the 
search after friendship, and if he should record his 
true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to 
each new candidate for his love. 

Dear Friend : — 

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure 
to match my mood with thine, I should never think 
again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings 


182 


ESSAY VI. 


I am not very wise ; my moods are quite attainable , 
and I respect thy genius ; it is to me as yet unfath- 
omed ; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect in- 
telligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious 
torment. Thine ever, or never. 

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are foi 
curiosity, and not for life. They are not to be in- 
dulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. 
Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, 
because we have made them a texture of wine and 
dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human 
heart. The laws of friendship are austere and 
eternal, of one web with the law's of nature and of 
morals. But we have aimed at a sw r ift and petty 
benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at 
the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which 
many summers and many winters must ripen. We 
seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate 
passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. 
In vain. We are armed all over with subtle antago- 
nisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and 
translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all peo- 
ple descend to meet. All association must be a 
compromise, and, what is worst, the very fiower and 
aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures 
disappears as they approach each other. What a 
)erpetual disappointment is actual society, even of 


FRIENDSHIP. 


183 


the virtuous and gifted ! After interviews have been 
compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented 
presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable 
apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, 
in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our fac- 
ulties do not play us true, and both parties are re- 
lieved by solitude. 

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes 
no difference how many friends I have, and what 
content I can find in conversing with each, if there be 
one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk un- 
equal from one contest, the joy I find in all the rest 
becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, 
if then I made my other friends my asylum. 

“ The valiant warrior famoused for fight. 

After a hundred victories, once foiled, 

Is from the book of honor razed quite, 

And all the rest forgot for which he toiled. 

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashful- 
ness and apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate 
organization is protected from premature ripening. 
It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the 
best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. 
Respect the nalurlangsamkeit which hardens the ru- 
by in a million years, and works in duration, in which 
Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The 
good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the 
orice of rashness. Love, which is the essence of 


184 


ESSAl VI. 


God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man 
Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, 
but the austerest worth ; let us approach our friend 
with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in 
the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foun- 
dations. 

The attractions of this subject are not to be re- 
sisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of sub- 
ordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and 
sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and 
which even leaves the language of love suspicious 
and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is 
so much divine. 

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but 
with roughest courage. When they are real, they 
are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest 
thing we know. For now, after so many ages of 
experience, what do we know of nature, or of our- 
selves ? Not one step has man taken toward the so- 
lution of the problem of his destiny. In one con- 
demnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. 
But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which .1 
draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul, is the 
nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the 
husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a 
friend ! It might well be built, like a festal bower 
or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if 
lie know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its 


FRIENDSHIP. 


185 


aw ! lie who offers himself a candidate for that 
covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great 
games, where the first-born of the world are the 
competitors. He proposes himself for contests 
where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and 
he alone is victor who has truth enough in his con- 
stitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from 
the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune 
may be present or absent, but all the speed in that 
contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the con- 
tempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to 
the composition of friendship, each so sovereign 
that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason 
why either should be first named. One is Truth. 
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. 
Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last 
in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I 
may drop even those undermost garments of dissim- 
ulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men 
never put off, and may deal with him with the sim- 
plicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom 
meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, 
like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, 
that being permitted to speak truth, as having none 
above it to court or conform unto. Every man 
alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second 
oerson. hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the 
approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gos« 


18(5 


ESSAY VI. 


sip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our 
thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew £ 
man, who, under a certain religious frenzy, cast ofF 
this drapery, and, omitting all compliment and com- 
monplace, spoke to the conscience of every person 
lie encountered, and that with great insight and beau- 
ty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he 
was mad. But persisting, as indeed he could not 
lielp doing, for some time in this course, he attained 
to the advantage of bringing every man of his ac- 
quaintance into true relations with him. No man 
would think of speaking falsely with him, or of put- 
ting him off with any chat of markets or reading- 
rooms. But every man was constrained by so much 
sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of 
nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, 
he did certainly show him. But to most of us so- 
ciety shows not its face and eye, but its side and its 
back. To stand in true relations with men in a false 
age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not ? We can 
seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet re- 
quires some civility, — requires to be humored ; he 
has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion 
or philanthropy in his head that is not to be ques- 
tioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. 
But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my in- 
genuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment 
without requiring any stipulation on my part. A 


FRIENDSHIP. 


187 


friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. 1 
who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose 
existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my 
own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all 
its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a for- 
eign form ; so that a friend may well be reckoned the 
masterpiece of nature. 

The other element of friendship is tenderness. 
We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, 
by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, 
by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and 
trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much charac- 
ter can subsist in another as to draw us by love. 
Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we 
can offer him tenderness ? When a man becomes 
dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I 
find very little written directly to the heart of this mat- 
ter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot 
choose but remember. My author says, — “ I offer 
myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually 
am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the 
most devoted.” I wish that friendship should have 
feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant 
itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. 
I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite 
a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes 
love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful 
loans ; it is good neighbourhood ; it watches with the 


188 


ESSAY VI. 


sick ; it holds the pall at the funeral ; and quite lose? 
sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. 
But though we cannot find the god under this dis- 
guise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we cannot 
forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does 
not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues 
of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity. I hate the 
prostitution of the name of friendship to signify mod- 
ish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the compa- 
ny of ploughboys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and 
perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encoun- 
ter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and 
dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is 
a commerce the most strict and homely that can be 
joined ; more strict than any of which we have expe- 
rience. It is for aid and comfort through all the rela- 
tions and passages of life and death. It is fit for 
serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, 
but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, 
poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the 
sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We 
are to dignify to each other the daily needs and 
offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, 
wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into some- 
thing usual and settled, but should be alert and in- 
ventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was 
drudgery. 

Friendship may be said to require natures so 


FRIENDSHIP. 


189 


rare and cosily, each so well tempered and so hap- 
pily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even 
in that particular, a poet says, love demands that 
the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction 
can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in 
its perfection, say some of those who are learned 
in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than 
two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, per- 
haps because I have never known so high a fellow- 
ship as others. I please my imagination more with 
a circle of godlike men and women variously related 
to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty 
intelligence. But I find this law of one to one 
peremptory for conversation, which is the practice 
and consummation of friendship. Do not mix wa- 
ters too much. The best mix as ill as good and 
bad. You shall have very useful and cheering dis- 
course at several times with two several men, but let 
all three of you come together, and you shall not 
have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and 
one may hear, but three cannot take part in a con- 
versation of the most sincere and searching sort. 
In good company there is never such discourse be- 
tween two, across the table, as takes place when you 
leave tiiem alone. In good company, the individuals 
merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co- 
extensive with the several consciousnesses there pres- 
ent No partialities of friend to friend, no fondness- 


ESSAY VI. 


uo 

es of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there 
pertinent, hut quite otherwise. Only he may then 
speak who can sail on the common thought of the 
party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this 
convention, which good sense demands, destroys the 
high freedom of great conversation, which requires 
an absolute running of two souls into one. 

No two men hut, being left alone with each other, 
enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that 
determines which two shall converse. Unrelated 
men give little joy to each other ; will never suspect 
the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a 
great talent for conversation, as if it w r ere a perma- 
nent property in some individuals. Conversation is 
an evanescent relation, — no more. A man is reput- 
ed to have thought and eloquence ; he cannot, for all 
that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They 
accuse his silence with as much reason as they would 
blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In 
the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who 
enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue. 

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt like- 
ness and unlikeness, that piques each with the pres- 
ence of power and of consent in the other party. 
Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than 
that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, 
his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antago- 
nism and by compliance. Let him not cease an in* 


FRIENDSHIP. 


191 


stant to be himself. The only joy I have in his 
being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, 
where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least 
a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. 
Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his 
echo. The condition which high friendship de^ 
mauds is ability to do without it. That high 
office requires great and sublime parts. There 
must be very tw r o, before there can be very one. 
Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable na- 
tures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet 
they recognize the deep identity which beneath these 
disparities unites them. 

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; 
who is sure that greatness and goodness are always 
economy ; who is not swift to intermeddle with his 
fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave 
to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accel- 
erate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands 
a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our 
friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is 
a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. 
Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that 
you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close 
to your person. Stand aside ; give those merits 
room ; let them mount and expand. Are you the 
friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought ? 
To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a 


192 


ESSAY VI. 


thousand particulars, that he may come near in the 
holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard 
a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-con- 
founding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit. 

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long 
probation. Why should we desecrate noble and 
beautiful souls by intruding on them ? Why insist 
on rash personal relations with your friend ? Why 
go to his house, or know his mother and brother 
and sisters ? Why be visited by him at your own ? 
Are these things material to our covenant ? Leave 
this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a 
spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance 
from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can 
get politics, and chat, and neighbourly conveniences 
from cheaper companions. Should not the society 
of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and 
great as nature itself ? Ought I to feel that our tie 
is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud 
that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving 
grass that divides the brook ? Let us not vilify, but 
raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, 
that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not 
pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and 
enhance. Worship his superiorities ; wish him not 
loss by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. 
Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee 
for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, de- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


193 


voutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be 
soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the 
opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, 
il the eye is too near. To my friend I write a let- 
ter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems 
to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift 
worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It 
profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will 
trust itself, as will not to the tongue, and pour out 
the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the an- 
nals of heroism have yet made good. 

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as 
not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impa- 
tience for its opening. We must be our own before 
we can be another’s. There is at least this satisfac- 
tion in crime, according to the Latin proverb ; — you 
can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Cri- 
men quos inquinat , cequat. To those whom we ad- 
mire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least de- 
fect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the 
entire relation. There can never be deep peace 
between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in 
their dialogue, each stands for the whole world. 

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with 
what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — 
so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us 
not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you 
should say to the select souls, or how to say any 
13 


194 


ESSAY VI. 


tiling to such ? No matter how ingenious, no mattei 
how graceful and bland. There are innumerable 
degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say 
aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shal 
speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting 

overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves 
of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue 
the only way to have a friend is to be one. You 
shall not come nearer a man by getting into his 
house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster 

from you, and you shall never catch a true glance 
of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they 
repel us ; why should we intrude ? Late, — very 
late, — we perceive that no arrangements, no intro- 
ductions, no consuetudes or habits of society, would 
be of any avail to establish us in such relations with 
them as we desire, — but solely the uprise of nature 
in us to the same degree it is in them ; then shall we 
meet as water with water ; and if we should not 
meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are 
already they. In the last analysis, love is only the 
reflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men. 
Men have sometimes exchanged names with their 
friends, as if they would signify that in their friend 
each loved his own soul. 

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of 
course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood 
We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as wa 


FRIENDSHIP. 


195 


desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope 
cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other 
regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, 
enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which 
we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that 
the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders, and of 
shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finish- 
ed men, we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. 
Only be admonished by what you already see, not to 
strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where 
no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us in- 
to rash and foolish alliances which no God attends. 
By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the lit- 
tle you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, 
so as to put yourself out of the reach cf false relations, 
and you draw to you the first-born of the world, — 
those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander 
in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great 
show as spectres and shadows merely. 

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too 
spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. 
Whatever correction of our popular views we make 
from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, 
and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay 
us with a greater. Let us feel, if we will, the abso- 
lute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all 
in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, o«r 
we road books, in the instinctive faith that these will 


196 


ESSAY VI. 


call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars a.!. 
The persons are such as we ; the Europe an old 
faded garment of dead persons ; the books their 
ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over 
this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest 
friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ‘ Who arc 
you ? Unhand me : I will be dependent no more.’ 
Ah ! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part 
only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be 
more each other’s, because we are more our own ? 
A friend is Janus-faced : he looks to the past and 
the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, 
the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of 
a greater friend. 

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. 
I would have them where I can find them, but I sel- 
dom use them. We must have society on our own 
terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. 
I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If 
he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot de- 
scend to converse. In the great days, presentiments 
hover before me in the firmament. I ought then to 
dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize 
them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only 
that I may lose them receding into the sky in which 
now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, 
though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk 
with them and study their visions, lest T lose my 


FRIENDSHIP. 


197 


own. It would indeed give me a certain household 
Joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astrono- 
my, or search of stars, and come down to warm 
sympathies with you ; but then I know well I shall 
mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It 
is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when 
I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign ob- 
jects ; then I shall regret the lost literature of your 
mind, and wish you were by my side again. But 
if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only 
with new visions, not with yourself but with your 
lustres, and I shall not be able any more than now 
to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends 
this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from 
them, not what they have, but what they are. They 
shall give me that which properly they cannot give, 
but which emanates from them. But they shall not 
hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We 
will meet as though we met not, and part as though 
we parted not. 

It has seemed to me lately more possible than 1 
knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, 
without due correspondence on the other. Why 
should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver 
is not capacious ? It never troubles the sun that 
some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful 
space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. 
Let your greatness educate the crude and cold com- 


198 


ESSAY VI. 


panion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass 
away ; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and, 
no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar 
and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is 
thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great 
will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True 
love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and 
broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed 
mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much 
earth, and feels its independency the surer. Yet 
these things may hardly be said without a sort of 
treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship 
is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must 
not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its 
object as a god, that it may deify both. 


PRUDENCE. 


Theme no poet gladly sung, 

Fair to old and foul to young, 
Scorn not thou the love of parts^ 
And the articles of arts. 
Grandeur of the perfect sphere 
Thanks the atoms that coheie. 



ESSAY VII. 


PRUDENCE. 

— ♦ — 

W ii at right have I to write on Prudence, where- 
of I have little, and that of the negative sort ? My 
prudence consists in avoiding and going without, not 
in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit 
steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to 
make money spend well, no genius in my economy, 
and whoever sees my garden discovers that I must 
have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate 
lubricity, and people without perception. Then I 
have the same title to write on prudence, that I have 
to write on poetry or holiness. We write from 
aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experi- 
ence. We paint those qualities which we do not 
possess. The poet admires the man of energy and 
tactics ; the merchant breeds his son for the church 
or the bar : and where a man is not vain and egotis- 
tic, you shall find what he has not by his praise. 
Moreover, it would be hardly honest in me not to 


202 


ESSAY VII. 


balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friend- 
ship with words of coarser sound, and, whilst mv 
debt to my senses is real and constant, not to own it 
in passing. 

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the 
science of appearances. It is the outmost action of 
die inward life. It is God taking thought for oxen. 
It moves matter after the laws of matter. It is 
content to seek health of body by complying with 
physical conditions, and health of mind by the laws 
of the intellect. 

The world of the senses is a world of shows ; it 
does not exist for itself, but has a symbolic char- 
acter ; and a true prudence or law of shows rec- 
ognizes the co-presence of other laws, and knows 
that its own office is subaltern ; knows that it is sur- 
face and not centre where it works. Prudence is 
false when detached. It is legitimate when it is the 
Natural History of the soul incarnate ; when it un- 
folds the beauty of laws within the narrow scope of 
the senses. 

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge 
of the world. It is sufficient, to our present pur- 
pose, to indicate three. One class live to the utility 
of the symbol ; esteeming health and wealth a final 
good. Another class live above this mark to the 
beauty of the symbol ; as the poet, and artist, and 
the naturalist, and man of science. A third class 


PRUDENCE. 


20b 


live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of 
the thing signified ; these are wise men. The first 
class have common sense ; the second, taste ; and 
the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, 
a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys 
the symbol solidly ; then also lias a clear eye for its 
beauty, and, lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this 
sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build 
houses and barns thereon, reverencing the splendor 
of the God which he sees bursting through each 
chink and cranny. 

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and 
winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to 
matter, as if we possessed no other faculties than the 
palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear ; a pru- 
dence which adores the Rule of Three, which never 
subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, 
and asks but one question of any project, — Will it 
bake bread ? This is a disease like a thickening of 
the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But 
culture, revealing the high origin of the apparent 
world, and aiming at the perfection of the man as the 
end, degrades every thing else, as health and bodily 
life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a sev- 
eral faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue con- 
versing with the body and its wants. Cultivated 
men always feel and speak so, as if a great fortune, 
the achievement of a civil or social measure, great 


204 


ESSAY VII. 


personal influence, a graceful and commanding ad 
dress, had their value as proofs of the energy of the 
spirit. If a man lose his balance, and immerse him- 
self in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he 
may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cul- 
tivated man. 

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, 
is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of 
all comedy. It is nature’s joke, and therefore litera- 
ture’s. The true prudence limits this sensualism by 
admitting the knowledge of an internal and real 
world. This recognition once made, — the order 
of the world and the distribution of affairs and times 
being studied with the co-perception of their subordi- 
nate place, will reward any degree of attention. For 
our existence, thus apparently attached in nature to 
the sun and the returning moon and the periods 
which they mark, — so susceptible to climate and to 
country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of 
splendor, and so tender to hunger and cold and 
debt, — reads all its primary lessons out of these 
books. 

Prudence does not go behind nature, and ask 
whence it is. It takes the laws of the world, where- 
by man’s being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps 
these laws, that it may enjoy their proper good. It 
respects space and time, climate, want, sleep, the 
*aw of polarity, growth, and death. There revolve 


PRUDENCE. 


205 


to give bound and period to his being, on all sides, 
the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky : 
here lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve from 
its chemical routine. Here is a planted globe, 
pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced 
and distributed externally with civil partitions and 
properties which impose new restraints on the young 
inhabitant. 

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. 
We live by the air which blows around us, and we 
are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, 
too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so va- 
cant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and 
peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be 
painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, 
or meal, or salt ; the house smokes, or I have a 
headache ; then the tax ; and an affair to be trans- 
acted with a man without heart or brains ; and the 
stingingrecollection of an injurious or very awkward 
word, — these eat up the hours. Do what we can, 
summer will have its flies : if we walk in the woods, 
we must feed mosquitos : if we go a-fishing, we 
must expect a w r et coat. Then climate is a great 
impediment to idle persons : we often resolve to give 
up the care of the weather, but still we regard the 
clouds and the rain. 

We are instructed by these petty experiences 
which usurp the hours and years. The hard soil 


206 


ESSAY VII. 


and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the 
northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fel- 
low who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics. The 
islander may ramble all day at will. At night, he 
may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a 
wild date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer 
even, spread a table for his morning meal. The 
northerner is perforce a householder. He must 
brew, bake, salt, and preserve his food, and pile 
wood and coal. But as it happens that not one 
stroke can labor lay to, without some new acquaint- 
ance with nature ; and as nature is inexhaustibly 
significant, the inhabitants of these climates have 
always excelled the southerner in force. Such is 
the value of these matters, that a man who knows 
other things can never know too much of these. 
Let him have accurate perceptions. Let him, if 
he have hands, handle ; if eyes, measure and dis- 
criminate ; let him accept and hive every fact of 
chemistry, natural history, and economics ; the more 
he has, the less is he willing to spare any one. Time 
is always bringing the occasions that disclose their 
value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural 
and innocent action. The domestic man, who loves 
no music so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs 
which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, 
has solaces which others never dream of. The ap- 
plication of means to ends insures victory and the 


PRUDENCE. 


207 


songs of victory, not less in a farm or a shop than ir 
the tactics of party or of war. The good husband 
finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood 
in a shed, or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, 
as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the Depart- 
ment of State. In the rainy day, he builds a work- 
bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of the 
barn-chamber, and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, 
screwdriver, and chisel. Herein he tastes an old 
joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of 
garrets, presses, and corn-chambers, and of the con- 
veniences of long housekeeping. His garden or his 
poultry-yard tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One 
might find argument for optimism in the abundant 
flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in every 
suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a 
man keep the law r , — any law, — and his way will be 
strown with satisfactions. There is more difference 
in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount. 

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of 
prudence. If you think the senses final, obey their 
law. If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at 
sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree 
of cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes, tc 
deal with men of loose and imperfect perception 
Dr. Johnson is reported to have said, — u If the child 
says he looked out of this window, when he looked 
out of that, — whip him.” Our American charactci 


208 


ESSAY VII. 


is marked by a more than average delight in accurate 
perception, which is shown by the currency of the 
byword, u No mistake.” But the discomfort of 
unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about facts, of 
inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. 
The beautiful laws of time and space, once dis- 
located by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If 
the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid, hands, in-^ 
stead of honey, it will yield us bees. Our words and 
actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and pleas- 
ant sound is the whetting of the scythe in the morn- 
ings of June ; yet what is more lonesome and sad 
than the sound of a whetstone or mower’s rifle, 
when it is too late in the season to make hay ? 
Scatter-brained and u afternoon men ” spoil much 
more than their own affair, in spoiling the temper of 
those who deal with them. I have seen a criticism 
on some paintings, of which I am reminded when I 
see the shiftless and unhappy men who are not true 
to their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar, 
a man of superior understanding, said : — “ I have 
sometimes remarked in the presence of great works 
of art, and just now especially, in Dresden, how 
much a certain property contributes to the effect 
which gives life to the figures, and to the life; an ir- 
resistible truth. This property is the hitting, in all 
the figures we draw, the right centre of gravity. I 
mean, the placing the figures firm upon their feet, 


PRUDENCE. 


209 


making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on 
the spot where they should look. Even lifeless 
figures, as vessels and stools, — let them be drawn 
ever so correctly, — lose all effect so soon as they 
lack the resting upon their centre of gravity, and 
have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance. 
The Raphael, in the Dresden gallery, (the onty 
greatly affecting picture which I have seen,) is the 
quietest and most passionless piece you can imagine , 
a couple of saints who worship the Virgin and Child. 
Nevertheless, it awakens a deeper impression than 
the contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, be 
side all the resistless beauty of form, it possesses in 
the highest degree the property of the perpendicu- 
larity of all the figures.” This perpendicularity we 
demand of all the figures in this picture of life. Let 
them stand on their feet, and not float and swing. 
Let us know where to find them. Let them dis- 
criminate between what they remember and what 
they dreamed, call a spade a spade, give us facts, 
and honor their own senses with trust. 

But what man shall dare tax another with impru- 
dence ? Who is prudent ? The men we call great- 
est are least in this kingdom. There is a certain 
fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting 
our modr s of living, and making every law our 
enemy, which seems at last to have aroused all the 
wit and virtue in the world to ponder the qi estion of 
14 


210 


ESSAY VII. 


Reform. We must call the highest prudence to 
counsel, and ask why health and beauty and genius 
should now be the exception, rather than the rule, of 
human nature ? We do not know the properties of 
plants and animals and the laws of nature through 
our sympathy with the same ; but this remains the 
dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be 
coincident. Poets should be lawgivers ; that is, the 
boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, 
but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the 
day’s work. But now the two things seem irrecon- 
cilably parted. We have violated law upon law, 
until we stand amidst ruins, and when by chance we 
espy a coincidence between reason and the phe- 
nomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the 
dowry of every man and woman, as invariably as 
sensation ; but it is rare. Health or sound organiza- 
tion should be universal. Genius should be the child 
of genius, and every child should be inspired ; but 
now it is not to be predicted of any child, and no- 
where is it pure. We call partial half-lights, by 
courtesy, genius ; talent which converts itself to 
money ; talent which glitters to-day, that it may dine 
and sleep well to-morrow ; and society is officered 
by men of parts , as they are properly called, and 
not by divine men. These use their gift, to refine 
luxury, nrt to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic ; 
and piety and love. Appetite shows to the finer 


TRUiJKNCE. 


211 


souls as a disease, and they find beauty m rites and 
bounds that resist it. 

We have found out fine names to cover our sensu- 
ality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance. 
The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of 
the laws of the senses trivial, and to count diem 
nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His 
art never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, 
nor the wish to reap where he had not sowed. His 
art is less for every deduction from his holiness, and 
less for every defect of common sense. On him 
who scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world 
wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small things 
will perish by little and little. Goethe’s Tasso is 
very likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and 
that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so gen 
uine grief when some tyrannous Richard the Third 
oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as 
when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently right, 
wrong each other. One living after the maxims of 
this world, and consistent and true to them, the other 
fired with all divine sentiments, yet grasping also at 
the pleasures of sense, without submitting to their 
law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot 
untie. Tasso’s is no infrequent case in modern 
biography. A man of genius, of an ardent tempera- 
ment, reckless of physical laws, self-indulgent, be- 
comes presently unfortunate, querulous, a “ discom- 
fortable cousin,” a thorn to himself and to others. 


212 


ESSAY VII. 


The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst 
something higher than prudence is active, he is admi- 
rable ; when common sense is wanted, he is an en- 
cumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great; 
to-day, the felon at the gallows 1 foot is not more 
miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an 
ideal world, in which he lives, the first of men ; and 
now oppressed by wants and by sickness, for which 
he must thank himself. He resembles the pitiful 
drivellers, whom travellers describe as frequenting the 
bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about all day, 
yellow, emaciated, ragged, sneaking ; and at evening, 
when the bazaars are open, slink to tbe opium-shop, 
swallow their morsel, and become tranquil and glori- 
fied seers. And who has not seen the tragedy of 
imprudent genius, struggling for years with paltry 
pecuniary difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, exhaust- 
ed, and fruitless, like a giant slaughtered by pins ? 

Is it not better that a man should accept the first 
pains and mortifications of this sort, which nature is- 
not slack in sending him, as hints that he must expect 
no other good than the just fruit of his own labor and 
self-denial ? Health, bread, climate, social position, 
have their importance, and he will give them their 
due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor, 
and her perfections the exact measure of our devia- 
tions. Let him make the night night, and the day 
day. Let him control the habit of expense. Lei 


PRUDENCE. 


2 1 


him see that as much wisdom may be expended on 
a private economy as on an empire, and as much 
wisdom may be drawn from it. The laws of the 
world are written out for him on every piece of 
money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be 
the better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of 
Poor Richard ; or the Stale-Street prudence of buy- 
ing by the acre to sell by the foot ; or the thrift of 
the agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, be- 
cause it will grow whilst he sleeps ; or the prudence 
which consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, 
little portions of time, particles of stock, and small 
gains. The eye of prudence may never shut. Iron, 
if kept at the ironmonger’s, will rust ; beer, if not 
brewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will 
sour ; timber of ships will rot at sea, or, if laid up 
high and dry, will strain, warp, and dry-rot ; money, 
if kept by us, yields no rent, and is liable to loss ; if 
invested, is liable to depreciation of the particular 
kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is 
white ; keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the 
scythe as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake. 
Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much on the 
extreme cf this prudence. It takes bank-notes, — 
good, bad, clean, ragged, — and saves itself by the 
speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot 
rust, nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go 
out of fashion, nor money stocks depreciate, in the 


214 


ESSAY VII. 


few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any 
one of them to remain in his possession. In skating 
over thin ice, our safety is in our speed. 

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Lei 
him learn that every tiling in nature, even motes and 
feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what 
he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-connnand, 
let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, 
that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to 
other men ; for the best good of wealth is freedom. 
Let him practise the minor virtues. How much of 
human life is lost in waiting ! let him not make his 
fellow-creatures wait. How many words and 
promises are promises of conversation ! let his be 
words of fate. When he sees a folded and sealed 
scrap of paper float round the globe in a pine ship, 
and come safe to the eye for which it was written, 
amidst a swarming population, let him likewise feel 
the admonition to integrate his being across all these 
distracting forces, and keep a slender human word 
among the storms, distances, and accidents that 
drive us hither and thither, and, by persistency, 
make the paltry force of one man reappear to re- 
deem its pledge, after months and years, in the most 
distant climates. 

We must not try to write the laws of any one vir- 
tue, looking at that only. Human nature loves no 
contradictions, but is symmetrical. The prudence 


PRUDENCE. 


215 


which secures an outward well-being is not to be 
studied by one set of men, whilst heroism and holi- 
ness are studied by another, but they are reconcila- 
ble. Prudence concerns the present time, persons, 
property, and existing forms. But as every fact 
hath its roots in the soul, and, if the soul were 
changed, would cease to be, or would become some 
other thing, the proper administration of outward 
things will always rest on a just apprehension of 
their cause and origin, that is, the good man will 
be the wise man, and the single-hearted, the politic 
man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of 
suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of hu- 
man society. On the most profitable lie, the course 
of events presently lays a destructive tax ; whilst 
frankness invites frankness, puts the parties on a 
convenient footing, and makes their business a friend- 
ship. Trust men, and they will be true to you ; 
treat them greatly, and they will show themselves 
great, though they make an exception in your favor 
to all their rules of trade. 

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable 
things, prudence does not consist in evasion, or in 
flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in 
the most peaceful parts of life with any serenitv 
must screw himself up to resolution. Let him front 
the object of his worst apprehension, and his stout- 
ness will commonly make his fear groundless. The 


216 


ESSAY VII. 


Latin proverb says, that “ in battles the eye is first 
overcome. ” Entire self-possession may make a 
battle very little more dangerous to life than a match 
at foils or at football. Examples are cited by sol- 
diers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed, and 
the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from 
the path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are 
chiefly confined to the parlour and the cabin. The 
drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health 
renews itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet, 
as under the sun of June. 

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among 
neighbours, fear comes readily to heart, and magnifies 
the consequence of the other party ; but it is a bad 
counsellor. Every man is actually weak, and appar- 
ently strong. To himself, he seems weak ; to others, 
formidable. You are afraid of Grim ; but Grim also 
is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the good-will 
of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill-will. But 
the sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neigh- 
bourhood, if you rip up his claims, is as thin and timid 
as any ; and the peace of society is often kept, be- 
cause, as children say, one is afraid, and the other 
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten ; 
bring them hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk. 

It is a proverb, that ‘courtesy costs nothing’; 
but calculation might come to value love for its profit. 
Love is fabled to be blind ; but kindness is necessary 


PRUDENCE. 


217 


to perception ; love is not a hood, but an eye- water. 
If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never 
recognize the dividing lines ; but meet on what com- 
mon ground remains, — if only that the sun shines, 
and the rain rains for both ; the area will widen 
very fast, and ere you know it the boundary moun- 
tains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted 
into air. If they set out to contend, Saint Paul will 
he, and Saint John will hate. What low, poor, 
paltry, hypocritical people an argument on religion 
will make of the pure and chosen souls ! They will 
shuffle, and crow, crook, and hide, feign to confess 
here, only that they may brag and conquer there, and 
not a thought has enriched either party, and not an 
emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither 
should you put yourself in a false position with your 
contemporaries, by indulging a vein of hostility and 
bitterness. Though your views are in straight antag- 
onism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, as- 
sume that you are saying precisely that which all 
think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your 
paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of 
a doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate deliv- 
erance. The natural motions of the soul are so 
much better than the voluntary ones, that you will 
never do yourself justice in dispute. The thought is 
not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not 
show itself proportioned, and in its true bearings, but 


218 


ESSAY Vil. 


bears extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But as 
smne a consent, and it shall presently he granted, 
since, really, and underneath their external diver- 
sities, all men are of one heart and mind. 

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or 
men on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy 
and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some 
hotter sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence 
and when ? To-morrow will be like to-day. Life 
wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. Our 
friends and fellow- workers die off from us. Scarcely 
can we say, we see new men, new women, approach- 
ing us. We are too old to regard fashion, too old 
to expect patronage of any greater or more power- 
ful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections 
and consuetudes that grow near us. These old 
shoes are easy to the feet. Undoubtedly, we can 
easily pick faults in our company, can easily whisper 
names prouder, and that tickle the fancy more. 
Every man’s imagination hath its friends ; and life 
would be dearer with such companions. But, if you 
cannot have them on good mutual terms, you cannot 
have them. If not the Deity, but our ambition, hews 
and shapes the new relations, their virtue escapes, as 
strawberries lose their flavor in garden-beds. 

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, 
and all the virtues, range themselves on the side of 
prudence, or the art of securing a present well-being 


PRUDENCE. 


213 


I do not know if all matter will be found to be made 
of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, bdt 
the world of manners and actions is wrought of one 
stuff, and, begin where we will, we are pretty sure ia 
a short space to be mumbling our ten command - 
menls. 









HEROISM 


• Paradise is under the shadow of swords.” 

Mahomet 


Kuby wine is drunk by knaves, 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves, 

Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons; 
Thunderclouds are Jove’s festoons, 
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread 
Lightning-knotted round his head; 
The hero is not fed on sweets, 

Daily his own heart he eats ; 
Chambers of the great are jails. 

And head-winds right for royal sails. 









ESSAY VIII. 


HEROISM 


In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the 
plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant 
recognition of gentility, as if a noble behaviour were 
as easily marked in the society of their age, as color 
is in our American population. When any Rodrigo, 
Pedro, or Valerio enters, though he be a stranger, 
the duke or governor exclaims, This is a gentleman, 
— and proffers civilities without end ; but all the 
rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with this de- 
light in personal advantages, there is in their plays a 
certain heroic cast of character and dialogue, — as 
in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double 
Marriage, — wherein the speaker is so earnest and 
cordial, and on such deep grounds of character, that 
the dialogue, on the slightest additional incident in 
the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among many 
texts, take the following. The Roman Martins has 
conquered Athens, — all but the invincible spirits of 


224 


ESSAY VIII. 


Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his 
wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martins, 
and he seeks to save her husband ; but Sophocles 
vv'll not ask his life, although assured that a word will 
save him, and the execution of both proceeds. 

Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell. 

Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dot igen, 

Yonder, above, ’bout Ariadne’s crown, 

My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste. 

Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight; 

Let not soft nature so transformed be, 

And lose her gentler sexed humanity, 

To make me see my lord bleed. So, ’t is well ; 

Never one object underneath the sun 
Will I behold before my Sophocles : 

Farewell ; now teach the Romans how to die. 

Mar. Dost know what ’t is to die ? 

Soph. Thou dost not, Martius, 

And, therefore, not what ’t is to live ; to die 

Is to begin to live. It is to end 

An old, stale, weary work, and to commence 

A newer and a better. ’T is to leave 

Deceitful knaves for the society 

Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part 

At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs, 

And prove thy fortitude what then ’t will do. 

Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus? 

Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent 
To them I ever loved best ? Now I ’ll kneel, 

But with my back toward thee , ’t is the last duty 
This trunk can do the gods. 

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius, 

Or Martius’ heart will leap out at his mouth. 

This is a man, a woman ! Kiss thy lord, 


HEROISM. 


225 


And live with all the freedom you were went. 

0 love! thou doubly hast afflicted me 

With virtue and witli beauty. Treacherous heart, 

My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn, 

Ere thou transgress this knot of piety. 

Val. What ails my brother? 

Soph. Martius, O Martius, 

Thou now hast found a way to conquer me. 

Dor. O star of Rome ! what gratitude can speak 
Fit words to follow such a deed as this ? 

Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius, 

With his disdain of fortune and of death, 

Captived himself, has captivated me, 

And though my arm hath ta’en his body here, 

His soul hath subjugated Martius’ soul. 

By Romulus, he is all soul, I think ; 

He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved ; 

Then we have vanquished nothing ; be is free, 

And Martius walks now in captivity.” 

1 do not readily remember any poem, play, ser- 
mon, novel, or oration, that our press vents in the 
last few years, which goes to the same tune. We 
have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often 
the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth’s Laoda- 
mia, and the ode of tc Dion,” and some sonnets, 
have a certain noble music ; and Scott will some- 
times draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evan- 
dale, given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, 
with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in 
character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites 
to drop from his biographical and historical pictures. 
Earlier, Robert Burns has given us a song or two 

15 


226 


ESSAY VIII. 


In the Harleian Miscellanies, there is an account of 
the battle of Lutzen, which deserves to be read. 
And Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens re- 
counts the prodigies of individual valor with admira- 
tion, all the more evident on the part of the narrator, 
that he seems to think that his place in Christian 
Oxford requires of him some proper protestations of 
abhorrence. But, if we explore the literature of 
Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who 
is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the 
Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminondas, the Scipio 
of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebt- 
ed to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of 
his 44 Lives ” is a refutation to the despondency and 
cowardice of our religious and political theorists. 
A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools, but 
of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given 
that book its immense fame. 

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more 
than books of political science, or of private econo- 
my. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from 
the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a 
ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the 
laws of nature by our predecessors and our contem- 
poraries are punished in us also The disease and 
deformity around us certify the infraction of natural, 
intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on 
violation to breed such compound misery. A lock 


HEROISM. 


221 


raw that bends a man’s head back to his heels, hy- 
drophobia, that makes him bark at his wife and 
babes, insanity, that makes him eat grass ; war. 
plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity 
in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, 
must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily, 
no man exists who has not in his own person be- 
come, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, 
and so made himself liable to a share in the ex- 
piation. 

Our culture, therefore, must not omit the' arming 
of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is bom 
into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and 
his own well-being require that he should not go dan- 
cing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collect- 
ed, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let 
him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, 
with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by 
the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of 
his behaviour 

Towards ail this external evil, the man within the 
breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his 
ability to cope single-handed with the infinite army 
of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul 
we give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is 
the contempt for safety and ease, which makes the 
attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which slights 
the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its en- 


228 


ESSAY VIII. 


ergy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. 
The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturb- 
ances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it 
were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in 
frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal 
dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical 
in heroism ; there is somewhat not holy in it ; it 
seen.s not to know that other souls are of one texture 
with it ; it has pride ; it is the extreme of individual 
nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. 
There is somewhat in great actions, which does not 
allow us to go behind them. Heroism feels and 
never reasons, and therefore is always right ; and al- 
though a different breeding, different religion, and 
greater intellectual activity would have modified or 
even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero 
that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open 
to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the 
avowal of the unschooled man, that he finds a quality 
in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, 
of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his 
will is higher and more excellent than all actual and 
all possible antagonists. 

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of 
mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the 
voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedi- 
ence to a secret impulse of an individual’s character. 
Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as if 


HEROISM. 


22& 


does to him, for every man must be supposed to see 
a little farther on his own proper path than any one 
else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at 
his act, until after some little time be past : then they 
see it to be in unison with their acts. All prudent 
men see that the action is clean contrary to a sensual 
prosperity ; for every heroic act measures itself by 
its contempt of some external good. But it finds it? 
own success at last, and then the prudent also extol 
Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is tin 
state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are 
the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the 
power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. 
It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospi- 
table, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and 
scornful of being scorned. It persists ; it is of an 
undaunted boldness, and of a fortitude not to be 
wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common 
life. That false prudence which dotes on health 
and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism. 
Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its 
body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar-plums 
and cats’-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, 
cards, and custard, which rack the wit of all society. 
What joys has kind nature provided for us dear 
creatures ! There seems to be no interval between 
greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not 
master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little 


230 


ESSAY VIII. 


man takes the great hoax so innocently, works in it 
so headlong and believing, is born red, and dies gray, 
arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, lay- 
ing traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his 
heart on a hoise or a rifle, made happy with a little 
gossip or a little praise, that the great soul cannot 
choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. “ Indeed, 
these humble considerations make me out of love 
with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take 
note how many pairs of silk stockings thou hast, 
namely, these and those that were the peach-colored 
ones ; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one 
for superfluity, and one other for use ! ” 

Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, con- 
sider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at their 
fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and the un- 
usual display : the soul of a better quality thrusts 
back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of 
life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice 
and the fire he will provide. Ibn Hankal, the Ara- 
bian geographer, describes a heroic extreme in the 
hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. u When I was 
in Sogd, I saw a great building, like a palace, the 
gates of which were open and fixed back to the wall 
with large nails. I asked the reason, and was told 
that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a 
hundred years. Strangers may present themselves 
il any Rour, and in whatever number ; the master has 


HEROISM. 


231 


amply provided for the reception of the men and 
their animals, and is never happier than when they 
tarry fo: some time. Nothing of the kind have I 
seen in any other country.” The magnanimous 
know very well that they who give time, or money, 
or shelter, to the stranger — so it be done for love, 
and not for ostentation — do, as it w T ere, put God un- 
der obligation to them, so perfect are the compensa- 
tions of the universe. In some way the time they 
seem to lose is redeemed, and the pains they seem 
to take remunerate themselves. These men fan the 
flame of human love, and raise the standard of civil 
virtue among mankind. But hospitality must be for 
service, and not for show, or it pulls dow r n the host. 
The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by 
the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives 
what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can 
lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than 
belong to city feasts. 

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the 
same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he 
has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its aus- 
ter : ty. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, 
and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine- 
drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or 
silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he 
dines, how he dresses ; but without railing or precis- 
on, his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, 


232 


ESSAY VIII. 


the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine, — 
“It is a noble, generous liquor, and we should be 
humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was 
made before it.” Better still is the temperance of 
King David, who poured out on the ground unto the 
Lord the water which three of his warriors had 
brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives. 

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword, 
after the battle of Philippi, he q.ioted a line of Eu- 
ripides, — u O virtue ! I have followed thee through 
life, and I find thee at last but a shade.” I doubt 
not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic 
soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It 
does not ask to dine nicely, and to sleep warm. 
The essence of greatness is the perception that vir- 
tue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does 
not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss. 

But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic 
class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. 
It is a height to which common duty can very well 
attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But 
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so 
cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies 
oy petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their 
own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with pecu- 
lation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as 
to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of 
Ins accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces be* 


HEROISM. 


233 


fore the tribunes. Socrates’s condemnation of him- 
self to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, 
during his life, and Sir Thomas More’s playfulness at 
the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont 
and Fletcher’s “ Sea Voyage,” Juletta tells the 
stout captain and his company, — 

“ Jul. Why, slaves, ’t is in our power to hang ye. 

Master. Very likely, 

’T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.” 

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the 
bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will 
not condescend to take any thing seriously ; all must 
be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the 
building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish 
churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth 
long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the 
history and customs of this world behind them, and 
play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue- 
Laws of the world ; and such would appear, could we 
see the human race assembled in vision, like little 
children frolicking together ; though, to the eyes of 
mankind at large, they wear a stately and solemn 
garb of works and influences. 

The interest these fine stories have for us, the 
power of a romance over the boy who grasps the 
forbidden book under his bench at school, our delight 
in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. A1 
mese great and transcendent properties are ours. If 


234 


ESSAY VIII. 


vve dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman 
pride, it is that vve are already domesticating the 
same sentiment. Let us find room for this great 
guest in our small houses. The first step of wor- 
thiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious as- 
sociations with places and times, with number and 
size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, 
Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear ? Where the 
heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and 
not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Con- 
necticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry 
places, and the ear loves names of foreign and clas- 
sic topography. But here we are ; and, if we will 
tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. 
See to it, only, that thyself is here ; — and art and 
nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Su- 
preme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber 
where thou sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affec- 
tionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus to die 
upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well 
where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground 
enough for Washington to tread, and London streets 
for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his cli- 
mate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the 
beloved element of all delicate spirits. That coun- 
try is the fairest, which is inhabited by the noblest 
minds. The pictures which fill the imagination in 
reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Colum- 


HEROISM. 


235 


bus, Bayard, Sidney, Hampden, teach us how 
needlessly mean our life is, that we, by the depth 
of our living, should deck it with more than re- 
gal or national splendor, and act on principles 
that should interest man and nature in the length 
of our days. 

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary 
young men, who never ripened, or whose perform- 
ance in actual life was not extraordinary. When we 
see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of 
society, of books, of religion, we admire their supe 
riority, they seem to throw contempt on our entire 
polity and social state ; theirs is the tone of a youth- 
ful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But they 
enter an active profession, and the forming Colossus 
shrinks to the common size of man. The magic 
they used w'as the ideal tendencies, which always 
make the Actual ridiculous ; but the tough world had 
its revenge the moment they put their horses of the 
sun to plough in its furrow. They found no exam- 
ple and no companion, and their heart fainted. 
What then ? The lesson they gave in their first 
aspirations is yet true ; and a better valor and a 
purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or 
why should a woman liken herself to any historical 
woman, and think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or 
De Steel, or the cloistered souls who have had ge- 
nius and cultivation, do not satisfy the imagination 


236 


ESSAY VIII. 


and the serene Themis, none can, — certainly not 
she. Why not ? She has a new and unattempted 
problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest na- 
ture that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect 
soul, walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of 
each new experience, search in turn all the objects 
that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power 
and the charm of her new-born being, which is the 
kindling of a new dawn in the recesses of space. 
The fair girl, who repels interference by a decided 
and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleas- 
ing, so wilful and lofty, inspires every beholder with 
somewhat of her own nobleness. The silent heart 
encourages her ; O friend, never strike sail to a fear ! 
Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. 
Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered 
and refined by the vision. 

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. 
All men have wandering impulses, fits, and starts of 
generosity. But when you have chosen your part, 
abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile your- 
self with the world. The heroic cannot be the com- 
mon, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the 
weakness to expect the sympathy of people in those 
actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympa- 
thy, and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would 
serve your brother, because i t is fit for you to serve 
him, do not take back your words when you find that 


HEROISM. 


237 


prulent people do not commend you. Adhere to 
your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have 
done something strange and extravagant, and broken 
the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high 
counsel that I once heard given to a young person, — 
“ Always do what you are afraid to do.” A simple, 
manly character need never make an apology, but 
should regard its past action with the calmness of 
Phocion, when he admitted that the event of the 
battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion 
from the battle. 

There is no weakness or exposure for which we 
cannot find consolation in the thought, — this is a 
part of my constitution, part of my relation and of- 
fice to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted 
with me that I should never appear to disadvantage, 
never make a ridiculous figure ? Let us be gener- 
ous of our dignity, as well as of our money. Great- 
ness once and for ever has done with opinion. We 
tell our charities, not because we wish to be praised 
for them, not because we think they have great mer- 
it, but for our justification. It is a capital blunder ; 
as you discover, when another man recites his char- 
ities. 

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to 
live with some rigor of temperance, or some ex- 
tremes of generosity, seems to be an asceticism 
which common good-nature would appoint to those 


238 


ESSAY VIII. 


who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel 
a brotherhood with the great multitude of sufiering 
men. And not only need we breathe and exercise 
the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of 
debt, of solitude, of unpopularity, but it behooves 
the wise man to look with a bold eye into those 
rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to 
familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, 
with sounds of execration, and the vision of violent 
death. 

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, 
but the day never shines in which this element may 
not work. The circumstances of man, we say, are 
historically somewhat better in this country, and at 
this hour, than perhaps ever before. More freedom 
exists for culture. It will not now run against an axe 
at the first step out of the beaten track of opinion. 
But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his 
edge. Human virtue demands her champions and 
martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds. 
It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave 
his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of 
free speech and opinion, and died when it was better 
not to live. 

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man 
can walk, but after the counsel of his own bosom. 
Let him quit too much association, let him go home 
umch, and stablish himself in those courses he ap- 


HEROISM. 


235 


proves. The unremitting retention of simple and 
high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening the 
character to that temper which will work with honor, 
if need be, in the tumult, or on the scaffold. What- 
ever outrages have happened to men may befall a 
man again ; and very easily in a republic, if there 
appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse 
slander, fire, tar and feathers, and the gibbet, the 
youth may freely bring home to his mind, and with 
vvliat sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how 
fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such penal- 
ties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and 
a sufficient number of his neighbours to pronounce 
bis opinions incendiary. 

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the 
most susceptible heart to see how quick a bound na- 
ture has set to the utmost infliction of malice. We 
rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can 
follow us. 

“ Let them rave : 

Thou art quiet in thy grave.” 

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in 
the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who 
does not envy those who have seen safely to an end 
their manful endeavour ? Who that sees the mean- 
ness of our politics, but inly congratulates Washing- 
ton that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, 
End for ever safe ; that he was laid sweet in his 


240 


ESSAY VIII. 


grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in 
him ? Who does not sometimes envy the good and 
brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults 
of the natural world, and await with curious compla- 
cency the speedy term of his own conversation with 
finite nature ? And yet the love that will be annihi- 
lated sooner than treacherous has already made 
death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but 
a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguish- 
able being. 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


• But souls that of his own good life partake, 

He loves as his own self ; dear as his eye 
They are to Him : He ’ll never them forsake : 
When they shall die, then God himself shall d/.<£ 
They live, they live in blest eternity.” 

Henry More. 


Space is ample, east and west, 

But two cannot go abreast, 

Cannot travel in it two : 

Yonder masterful cuckoo 
Crowds every egg out of the nest, 
Quick or dead, except its own; 

A spell is laid on sod and stone, 

Night and Day ’ve been tampered with. 
Every quality and pith 
Surcharged and sultry with a power 
That works its will on age and hour. 


16 










. 





* 




ESSAY IX. 


1'HE OVER-SOU Ji 


# 

There is a difference between one and anothei 
hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect 
Our faith comes in moments ; our vice is habitual. 
Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which 
constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to 
all other experiences. For this reason, the argument 
which is always forthcoming to silence those who 
conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely, the 
appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. 
We give up the past to the objector, and yet we 
hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that 
human life is mean ; but how did we find out that it 
was mean ? What is the ground of this uneasiness 
of ours ; oi this old discontent ? What is the uni- 
versal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine inu 
endo by which the soul makes its enormous claim ? 
Why do men feel that the natuial history of man has 
never been written, but he is always leaving behind 
what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and 


244 


ESSAY IX. 


books of metaphysics worthless ? The philosophj 
of six thousand years has not searched the chambers 
and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there 
has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum 
it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source 
is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we 
know not whence. The most exact calculator has 
no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not 
balk the very next moment. I am constrained every 
moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than 
the will I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When 
I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions 
I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, 
I see that I am a pensioner ; not a cause, but a 
surprised spectator of this ethereal water ; that I 
desire and look up, and put myself in the atti- 
tude of reception, but from some alien energy the 
visions come. 

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and 
the present, and the only prophet of that which must 
be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth 
lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere ; that Unity, 
that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular 
being is contained and made one with all other ; that 
common heart, of which all sincere conversation is 
the worship, to which all right action is submission ; 
that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


245 


and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what 
he is, and to speak from his character, and not from 
his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into 
our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and vir : 
lue, and power, and beauty. .We live in succession, 
in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within 
man is the soul of the whole ; the wise silence ; the 
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is 
equally related ; the eternal One. And this deep 
power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all 
accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect 
in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing 
seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the 
object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, 
as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree ; but the 
whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the 
soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the 
horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back 
on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of 
prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know' 
what it saith. Every man’s words, who speaks from 
that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell 
in the same thought on their own part. I dare not 
speak for it. My words do not carry its august 
sense ; they fall short and cold. Only itself can in- 
spire whom it will, and behold ! their speech shall 
be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of 
die 'vind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if 


246 


ESSAY IX. 


I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this 
deity, and to report what hints I have collected of 
the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest 
Law. 

If we consider what happens in conversation, in 
reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, 
in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see 
ourselves in masquerade, — the droll disguises only 
magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing 
it on our distinct notice, — we shall catch many hints 
that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the 
secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in 
man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all 
the organs ; is not a function, like the power of mem- 
ory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these 
as hands and feet ; is not a faculty, but a light ; is 
not the intellect or the will, but the master of the in- 
tellect and the will ; is the background of our be- 
ing, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed 
and that cannot be possessed. From within or from 
behind, a light shines through us upon things, and 
makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is 
all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all 
wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly 
call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting 
man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, 
hut misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, 
but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it ap- 


THE OVER-SOUL. 247 

peax through his action, would make our knees bend. 
When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius ; 
when it breathes through his will, it is virtue : when 
it flows through his affection, it is love. And the 
blindness of the intellect begins, when it would be 
something of itself. The weakness of the will be- 
gins, when the individual would be something of him- 
self. All reform aims, in some one particular, to let 
the soul have its way through us ; in other words, 
to engage us to obey. 

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sen- 
sible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It 
is too subtile. It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but 
we know that it pervades and contains us. We know 
that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old prov- 
erb says, “ God comes to see us without bell ” ; 
that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our 
heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or 
wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and 
God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. 
We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual na- 
ture, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and 
know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no 
man ever got above, but they tower over us, and 
most in the moment when our interests tempt us to 
wound them. 

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak 
s made known by us independency of those limita- 


248 


ESSAY IX. 


tions which circumscribe us on every hand. The 
soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it con- 
tradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes 
time and space. The influence of the senses has. 
in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, 
that the walls of time and space have come to look 
real and insurmountable ; and to speak with levity of 
these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. 
Aet time and space are but inverse measures of the 
force of the soul. The spirit sports with time, — 

“ Can crowd eternity into an hour, 

Or stretch an hour to eternity.” 

We are often made to feel that there is another 
youth and age than that which is measured from the 
year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always 
find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is 
the love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every 
man parts from that contemplation with the feeling 
that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. 
The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems 
us in a degree from the conditions of time. In sick- 
ness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry, or a pro- 
found sentence, and we are refreshed ; or produce a 
volume of Plato, or Shakspeare, or remind us of their 
names, and instantly we come into a feeling of lon- 
gevity. See how the deep, divine thought reduces 
centuries, and millenniums, and makes itself present 
through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less ef- 


Tilt OVER-SOUL. 


249 


fective now than it was when first his mouth wai 
opened ? The emphasis of facts and persons in 
my -thought has nothing to do with time. And so, 
always, the soul’s scale is one ; the scale of the 
senses and the understanding is another. Before 
the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and 
Nature shrink away. In common speech, we refer 
all things to time, as we habitually refer the immense- 
ly sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so 
we say that the Judgment is distant or near, that the 
Millennium approaches, that a day of certain political, 
moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, when 
we mean, that, in the nature of things, one of the facts 
we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the 
other is permanent and connate with the soul. The 
things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, de- 
tach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, 
and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows 
whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, Lon- 
don, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or 
any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so 
is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, 
creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind 
her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor 
specialties, nor men. The soul knows only ihe soul , 
the web of events is the flowing robe in which she 
s clothed. 

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate 
of its progress to be computed. The soul’s ad van- 


250 


ESSAY IX. 


ces are not made by gradation, such as can be repre- 
sented by motion in a straight line ; but rather by as- 
cension of state, such as can be represented by met- 
amorphosis, — from the egg to the worm, from the 
worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a 
certain total character, that does not advance the 
elect individual first over John, then Adam, then 
Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered in- 
feriority, but by every throe of growth the man ex- 
pands there where he works, passing, at each pulsa- 
tion, classes, populations, of men. With each divine 
impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible 
and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires 
and expires its air. It converses with truths that 
have always been spoken in the world, and becomes 
conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arri- 
an, than with persons in the house. 

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The 
simple rise as by specific levity, not into a particular 
virtue, but into the region of all the virtues. They 
are in the spirit which contains them all. The soul 
requires purity, but purity is not it ; requires justice, 
but justice is not that ; requires beneficence, but is 
somewhat better ; so that there is a kind of descent 
and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of 
moral nature, to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To 
the well-born child, all the virtues are natural, and 
not painfully acquired. Speak to his heart, and the 
man becomes suddenly virtuous. 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


251 


Within the same sentiment is the germ of intel- 
lectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those 
who are capable of humility, of justice, of love, of 
aspiration, stand already on a platform that com- 
mands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, ac- 
tion and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral 
beatitude already anticipates those special powers 
which, men prize so highly. The lover has no talent, 
no skill, which passes for quite nothing with his en- 
amoured maiden, however little she may possess of 
related faculty ; and the heart which abandons itself 
to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its 
works, and will travel a royal road to particular 
knowledges and powers. In ascending to this prima- 
ry and aboriginal sentiment, we have come from our 
remote station on the circumference instantaneously 
to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of 
God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, 
which is but a slow effect. 

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarna- 
tion of the spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own. 
I live in society ; with persons who answer to 
thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedi- 
ence to the great instincts to which I live. I see its 
presence to them. I am certified of a common na- 
ture ; and these other souls, these separated selves, 
draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me the 
new emotions we call passion ; of love, hatred, fear, 


252 


ESSAY IX. 


admiration, pity ; thence comes conversation, com- 
petition, persuasion, cities, and war. Persons are 
supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. 
In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and 
ycuth see all the world in them. But the larger ex- 
perience of man discovers the identical nature ap- 
pearing through them all. Persons themselves ac- 
quaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation 
between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a 
third party, to a common nature. That third party 
or common nature is not social ; it is impersonal ; is 
God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, 
and especially on high questions, the company be- 
come aware that the thought rises to an equal level 
in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in 
what was said, as well as the sayer. They all be- 
come wiser than they were. It arches over them 
like a temple, this unity of thought, in which every 
heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, 
and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All 
are conscious of attaining to a higher self-posses- 
sion. It shines for all. There is a certain wis- 
dom of humanity which is common to the greatest 
men with the lowest, and which our ordinary ed- 
ucation often labors to silence and obstruct. The 
mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for 
.ts own sake, think much less of property in truth. 
Tney accept it thankfully everywhere, and do not 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


253 


label or stamp it with any man’s name, for it is theirs 
long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned and 
the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. 
Their violence of direction in some degree disquali- 
fies them to think truly. We owe many valuable 
observations to people who are not very acute or pro- 
found, and who say the thing without effort, which 
we want and have long been hunting in vain. The 
action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and 
left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conver- 
sation. It broods over every society, and they un- 
consciously seek for it in each other. We know 
better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, 
and we know at the same time that we are much 
more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial 
conversation with my neighbours, that somewhat 
higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove 
nods to Jove from behind each of us. 

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean 
service to the world, for which they forsake their 
native nobleness, they resemble those Arabian 
sheiks, who dwell in mean houses, and affect an 
external poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pa- 
cha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their 
interior and guarded retirements. 

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every pe* 
r.iod of life. It is adult already in the infant man. 
In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, 


254 


ESSAY IX. 


my accomplishments and my money stead me noth- 
ing ; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, 
he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves 
me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by 
my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my 
will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire 
between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same 
soul ; he reveres and loves with me. 

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. 
We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scof- 
fer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, 
when you have spoken what they do not wish to 
hear, c How do you know it is truth, and not an er 
ror of your own ? ’ We know truth when we see 
it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake 
that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of 
Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone indicate 
the greatness of that man’s perception, — u It is no 
proof of a man’s understanding to be able to confirm 
whatever he pleases ; but to be able to discern that 
what is true is true, and that what is false is false, 
this is the mark and character of intelligence.” In 
the book I read, the good thought returns to me, as 
every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To 
the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul be- 
comes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it 
away. We are wiser than we know. If we will 
not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


255 


or see how the thing stands in God, we know the 
particular thing, and every tiling, and every man. 
For the Maker of all things and all persons stands 
behind us, and casts his dread omniscience through 
us over things. 

But beyond this recognition of its own in particu- 
lar passages of the individual’s experience, it also re- 
veals truth. And here we should seek to reinforce 
ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a 
worthier, loftier strain of that advent. ’ For the soul’s 
communication of truth is the highest event in nature, 
since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but 
it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man 
whom it enlightens ; or, in proportion to that truth he 
receives, it takes him to itself. 

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its 
manifestations of its own nature, by the term Reve- 
lation. These are always attended by the emotion 
of the sublime. For this communication is an influx 
of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of 
the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the 
sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this cen- 
tral commandment agitates men with awe and delight. 
A thrill passes through all men at the reception of 
new truth, or at the performance of a great action, 
which comes out of the heart of nature. In these 
communications, the power to see is not separated 
from thb will to do, but the insight proceeds from 


25 G 


ESSAY IX. 


obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful 
perception. Every moment when the individual feels 
himself invaded by it is memorable. By the neces- 
sity of our constitution, a certain enthusiasm attends 
the individual’s consciousness of that divine pres- 
ence. The character and duration of this enthusi- 
asm vaiies with the state of the individual, from an 
ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration, — which 
is its rarer appearance, —to the faintest glow of virtu- 
ous emotion, in which form it warms, like our house- 
hold fires, all the families and associations of men, 
and makes society possible. A certain tendency to 
insanity has always attended the opening of the re- 
ligious sense in men, as if they had been “ blasted 
with excess of light.” The trances of Socrates, 
the “union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, 
the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Bellmen, the 
convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the il- 
lumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What 
was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravish- 
ment has, in innumerable instances in common life, 
been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere 
the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusi 
asm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist ; 
the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the 
language of the New Jerusalem Church ; the revival 
of the Calvinistic churches ; the experiences of the 
Methodists, are varying forms of that* shudder of awe 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


257 


and delight with which the individual soul always 
mingles with the universal soul. 

The nature of these revelations is the same ; they 
are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solu- 
tions of the soul’s own questions. They do not an- 
swer the questions which the understanding asks. 
The soul answers never by words, but by the thing 
itseli that is inquired after. 

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The 
popular notion of a revelation is, that it is a telling 
of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul, the under- 
standing seeks to find answers to sensual questions, 
and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall 
exist, what their hands shall do, and who shall he 
their company, adding names, and dates, and places. 
But we must pick no locks. We must check this 
low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive ; it 
is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do 
not require a description of the countries towards 
which you sail. The description does not describe 
them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there, and 
know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning 
the immortality of the soul, the employments of heav- 
en, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They eve:, 
dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these 
interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime 
spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, 
the attributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness 
17 


258 


ESSAY IX. 


is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these mor* 
al sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding 
only the manifestations of these, never made the sep- 
aration of the idea of duration from the essence of 
these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the 
duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples 
to sever duration from the moral elements, and to 
teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and 
maintain it by evidences. The moment the doc- 
trine of the immortality is separately taught, man is 
already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adora- 
tion of humility, there is no question of continuance. 
No inspired man ever asks this question, or conde 
scends to these evidences. For the soul is true to 
itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot 
wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future 
which would be finite. 

These questions which we lust to ask about the 
future are a confession of sin. God has no answer 
for them. No answer in words can reply to a ques- 
tion of things. It is not in an arbitrary cc decree of 
God,” but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts 
down on the facts of to-morrow ; for the soul will 
not have us read any other cipher than that of cause 
and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it 
instructs the children of men to live in to-day. The 
only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of 
the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accept- 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


259 


mg the tide of being which floats us into the secret 
of nature, work and live, work and live, and all un- 
awares the advancing soul has built and forged for it- 
self a new condition, and the question and the answer 
are one. 

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, 
which burns until it shall dissolve all things into 
the waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see 
and know each other, and what spirit each is of. 
Who can tell the grounds of his knowledge of the 
character of the several individuals in his circle of 
friends ? No man. Yet their acts and words do 
not disappoint him. In that man, though he knew 
no ill of him, he put no trust. In that other, 
though they had seldom met, authentic signs had 
yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as 
one who had an interest in his own character. We 
know each other very well, — which of us has been 
just to himself, and whether that which we teach or 
behold is only an aspiration, or is our honest effort 
also. 

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis 
lies aloft in our life or unconscious power. The inter- 
course of society, — its trade, its religion, its friend- 
ships, its quarrels, — is one wide, judicial investigation 
of character. In full court, or in small committee, 
or confronted face to face, accuser and accused, 
men offer themselves to be judged. Against theii 


2C0 


ESSAY IX. 


will they exhibit those decisive trifles by which char* 
acter is read. But who judges ? and what ? Not 
our understanding. We do not read them by learn- 
ing or craft. No ; the wisdom of the wise man con- 
sists herein, that he does not judge them ; he lets 
them judge themselves, and merely reads and records 
their own verdict. 

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is 
overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our imper- 
fections, your genius will speak from you, and mine 
from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not 
voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into 
our minds by avenues which we never left open, and 
thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which 
we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches 
over our head. The infallible index of true pro- 
gress is found in the tone the man takes. Neither 
his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, 
nor actions, nor talents, nor all together, can hinder 
him from being deferential to a higher spirit than his 
wn. If he have not found his home in God, his 
manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his senten- 
ces, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions, will 
voluntarily confess it, let him brave it out now he 
will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will 
shine through him, through all the disguises of igno 
ranee, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable cir 
cumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the 
tone of having is another. 


THE OVER -SOUL. 


26 i 


The great distinction between teachers sacred or 
literary, — between poets like Herbert, and poets like 
Pope, — between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, 
and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley, 
Mackintosh, and Stewart, — between men of the 
world, who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and 
here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying, half 
insane under the infinitude of his thought, — is, that 
one class speak from within , or from experience, 
as parties and possessors of the fact ; and the other 
class, from without , as spectators merely, or perhaps 
as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third 
persons. It is of no use to preach to me from with- 
out. I can do that too easily myself Jesus speaks 
always from within, and in a degree that transcends 
all others. In that is the miracle. I believe before- 
hand that it ought so to be. All men stand continu- 
ally in the expectation of the appearance of such a 
teacher. But if a man do not speak from within 
the veil, where the word is one with that it tells of, 
let him lowly confess it. 

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, 
and makes what we call genius. Much of the wis- 
dom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illu- 
minated class of men are no doubt superior to litera- 
ry fame, and are not writers. Among the multitude 
of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing pres 
ence ; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather 


2j2 


ESSAY IX. 


than of inspiration ; they have a light, and know not 
whence it comes, and call it their own ; their talent 
is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown mem 
her, so that their strength is a disease. In these in- 
stances the intellectual gifts do not make the impres- 
sion of virtue, but almost of vice ; and we feel that 
a man’s talents stand in the way of his advancement 
in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger im- 
bibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, 
but more like, and not less like other men. There 
is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is 
superior to any talents they exercise. The author, 
the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not 
take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, 
in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. 
They are content with truth. They use the positive 
degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those 
who have been spiced with the frantic passion and 
violent coloring of inferior, but popular writers. 
For they are poets by the free course which they 
allow to the informing soul, which through their 
eyes beholds again, and blesses the things which 
it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowl- 
edge ; wiser than any of its works. The great 
poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we 
think less of his compositions. His best commu- 
nication to our mind is to teach us to despise all 
he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


263 


strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth 
which beggars his own ; and we then feel that the 
splendid works which he has created, and which in 
other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poet- 
ry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the 
shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The in- 
spiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear 
could utter things as good from day to day, for ever. 
Why, then, should I make account of Hamlet and 
Lear, as if we had not the soul from which they fell 
as syllables from the tongue ? 

This energy does not descend into individual life 
on any other condition than entire possession. It 
comes to the lowly and simple ; it comes to whom- 
soever will put off what is foreign and proud ; it 
comes as insight ; it comes as serenity and grandeur. 
When we see those whom it inhabits, we are ap- 
prized of new degrees of greatness. From that in- 
spiration the man comes back with a changed tone. 
He does not talk with men with an eye to their opin- 
ion. He tries them. It requires of us to be plain 
and true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish 
his life by quoting my lord, and the prince, and the 
countess, who thus said or did to him. The ambi- 
tious vulgar show you their spoons, and brooches, 
and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. 
The more cultivated, in their account of their own 
experience, cull out the pleasing, poetic cure urn* 


264 


ESSAY IX. 


stance, — the visit to Rome, the man of genius they 
saw, the brilliant friend they know ; still further on, 
perhaps, the gorgeous landscape, the. mountain lights, 
the mountain thoughts, they enjoyed yesterday, — and 
so seek to throw a romantic color over their life. 
But the soul that ascends to worship the great God 
is plain and true ; has no rose-color, no fine friends, 
no chivalry, no adventures ; does not want admira- 
tion ; dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest 
experience of the common day, — by reason of the 
present moment and the mere trifle having be- 
come porous to thought, and bibulous of the sea 
of light. 

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and 
literature looks like word-catching. The simplest 
utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they 
so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite 
riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles 
off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, 
when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are 
ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of 
the circle, but the casting aside your trappings, and 
dealing man to man in naked truth, plain confession, 
and omniscient affirmation. 

Souls such as these treat you as gods would ; 
walk as gods in the earth, accepting without any ad- 
miration your wit, your bounty, your virtue even, — 
say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


265 


as their proper blood, royal as themselves, and over- 
royal, and the father of the gods. But what rebuke 
their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flattery 
with which authors solace each other and wound them- 
selves ! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these 
men go to see Cromwell, and Christina, and Charles 
the Second, and James the First, and the Grand Turk. 
For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of 
kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation 
in the world. They must always be a godsend to 
princes, for they confront them, a king to a king, 
without ducking or concession, and give a high na- 
ture the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, 
of plain humanity, of even companionship, and of 
new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior 
men. Souls like these make us feel that sincerity 
is more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly with 
man and woman, as to constrain the utmost sincerity, 
and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the 
highest compliment you can pay. Their u highest 
praising,” said Milton, “ is not flattery, and their 
plainest advice is a kind of praising.” 

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every 
act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his 
integrity worships God, becomes God ; yet for ever 
and ever the influx of this better and universal self 
is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and aston- 
ishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises 


206 


ESSAY IX. 


the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing 
the scars of our mistakes and disappointments ! 
When we have broken our god of tradition, ana 
ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God 
fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling 
of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of 
the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity 
on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. 
He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the 
best is the true, and may in that thought easily dis- 
miss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn 
to the sure revelation of time, the solution of his pri- 
vate riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to 
the heart of being. In the presence of law to his 
mind, he is overflowed with a reliance so universal, 
that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most 
stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He 
believes that he cannot escape from his good. The 
things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. 
You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet 
run, but your mind need not. If you do not find 
him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should 
not find him ? for there is a power, which, as it is in 
you, is in him also, and could therefore very well 
bring you together, if it were for the best. You are 
preparing with eagerness to go and render a service 
to which your talent and your taste invite you, the 
'ove of men and the hope of fame. Has it not oc- 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


267 


curred to you, that you have no right to go, unless 
you are equally willing to be prevented from go- 
ing ? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound 
that is spoken over the round world, which thou 
oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear ! Every 
proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to 
thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home 
through open or winding passages. Every friend 
whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender 
heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace 
And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of 
all ; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is 
there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls unin- 
terruptedly an endless circulation through all men, 
as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly 
seen, its tide is one. 

Let man, then, learn the revelation of all nature 
and all thought to his heart ; this, namely ; that the 
Highest dwells with him ; that the sources of nature 
are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is 
there. But if he would know what the great God 
speaketh, he must c go into his closet and shut the 
door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself 
manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to him- 
self, withdrawing himself from all the accents of oth- 
er men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful 
to him, until he have made his own. Our religion 
vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever 


268 


ESSAY IX. 


the appeal is made — no matter how indirectly - 
to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, 
that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, en- 
veloping thought to him never counts his company. 
When I sit in that presence, who shall dare to come 
in ? When I rest in perfect humility, when I bum 
with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg 
say ? 

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to 
numbers or to one. The faith that stands on author- 
ity is not faith. The reliance on authority measures 
the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. 
The position men have given to Jesus, now for many 
centuries of history, is a position of authority. It 
characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal 
facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flat- 
terer, it is no follower ; it never appeals from itself. 
It believes in itself. Before the immense possibili- 
ties of man, all mere experience, all past biography, 
however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before 
that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we 
cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or 
read of. We not only affirm that we have few great 
men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none ; 
that we have no history, no record of any character 
or mode of living, that entirely contents us. The 
saints and demigods whom history worships we are 
constrainel to accept with a grain of allowance 


THE OVER-SOUL. 


269 


Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength 
out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, 
as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they 
fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, 
original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and 
Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, 
and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young, and 
nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. 
It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls 
the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and 
the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, 
its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the 
great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore 
my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the 
great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and 
the stars, and feel them to be the fair accidents and 
effects which change and pass. More and more the 
surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I be- 
come public and human in my regards and actions. 
So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, 
which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and 
learning, as the ancient said, that “ its beauty is im- 
mense,” man will come to see that the world is the 
perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less 
astonished at particular wonders ; he will learn that 
there is no profane history ; that all history is sacred ; 
that the universe is represented in an atom, in a mo- 
ment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted 


270 


ESSAY IX. 


life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a di ■ 
vine unity. He will cease from what is base and 
frivolous in his life, and be content with all places 
and with any service he can render. He will calmly 
front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which 
carries God with it, and so hath already the whole 
future in the bottom of the heart. 


CIRCLES. 


Nature centres into balls, 

And her proud ephemerals, 
Fast to surface and outside, 
Scan the profile of the spheie ; 
Knew they what that signified, 
A new genesis were here 












ESSAY X. 


CIRCLES 


The eye is the first circle ; the horizon which it 
forms is the second ; and throughout nature this pri- 
mary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest 
emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine 
described the nature of God as a circle whose centre 
was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We 
are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this 
first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, 
in considering the circular or compensatory character 
of every human action. Another analogy we shall 
now trace ; that every action admits of being out- 
done. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, 
that around every circle another can be drawn ; that 
there is no end in nature, but every end is a begin- 
ning ; that there is always another dawn risen on 
mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep 
opens. 

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact 
18 


274 


ESSAY X. 


of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around whicn 
the hands of man can never meet, at once the in- 
spirer and the condemner of every success, may con- 
veniently serve us to connect many illustrations of 
human power in every department. 

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is 
fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of de- 
grees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, 
not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and 
holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of 
an idea which draws after it this train of cities and 
institutions. Let us rise into another idea : they will 
disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted away, 
as if it had been statues of ice ; here and there a 
solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see 
flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and 
mountain clefts, in June and July. For the genius 
that created it creates now somewhat else. The 
Greek letters last a little longer, but are already pass- 
ing under the same sentence, and tumbling into the 
inevitable pit which the creation of new thought 
opens for all that is old. The new continents are 
built out of the ruins of an old planet ; the new 
races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. 
New arts destroy the old. See the investment of 
capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics 
fortifications, by gunpowder ; roads and canals, bj 
railways ; sails, by steam ; steam by electricity. 


CIRCLES. 


275 


You admire this tower of granite, weathering the 
hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand 
built this huge wall, and that which builds is bet- 
ter than that which is built. The hand that built 
can topple it down much faster. Better than the 
hand, and nimbler, was the invisible thought which 
wrought through it; and. thus ever, behind the coarse 
effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, 
is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every thing 
looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich 
estate appears to women a firm and lasting fact ; to a 
merchant, one easily created out of any materials, 
and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good 
grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, 
to a citizen ; but to a large farmer, not much more 
fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks pro- 
vokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like 
all the rest ; and when once I comprehend that, will 
these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves 
hang so individually considerable ? Permanence is 
a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons 
are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat 
Dalis. 

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and 
defying though he look, he has a helm which he 
obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are 
classified. He can only be reformed by showing 
torn a new idea which commands his own. The life 


276 


ESSAY X. 


of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring 
imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to 
new and larger circles, and that without end. The 
extent to which this generation of circles, wheel 
without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth 
of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of 
each thought, having formed itself into a circular 
wave of circumstance, — as, for instance, an empire, 
rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite, — to 
heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify and hem in 
the life. But if the soul is quick and strong, it 
bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands 
another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up 
into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and 
to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned ; 
in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends out- 
ward with a vast force, and to immense and innumer- 
able expansions. 

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new se- 
ries. Every general law only a particular fact of 
some more general law presently to disclose itself. 
There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circum- 
ference to us. The man finishes his story, — how 
good ! how final ! how it puts a new face on all 
things ! He fills the sky. Lo ! on the other side 
rises also a man, and draws a circle around the cir- 
cle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. 
Then already is our first speaker not man, but only 


CIRCLES. 


211 


a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw 
a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do 
by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts 
the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be 
abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed 
to explain nature will itself be included as one ex- 
ample of a bolder generalization. In the thought of 
to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, 
all the creeds, all the literatures, of the nations, and 
marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has 
yet depicted. Every man is not so much a work- 
man in the world, as he is a suggestion of that he 
should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next 
age. 

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder : the 
steps are actions ; the new prospect is power. Ev- 
ery several result is threatened and judged by that 
which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted 
by the new ; it is only limited by the new. The 
new statement is always hated by the old, and, 
to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of 
skepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for 
the eye and it are effects of one cause ; then its in- 
nocency and benefit appear, and presently, all its en- 
ergy spent, it pales and dwindles before the revela- 
tion of the new hour. 

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact 
? ook crass and material, threatening to degrade thy 


278 


ESSAY X. 


theory of spirit ? Resist it not ; it goes to retine 
and raise thy theory of matter just as much. 

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to con- 
sciousness. Every man supposes himself not to be 
fully understood ; and if there is any truth in him, if 
he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how 
it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last 
closet, he must feel, was never opened ; there is 
always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That 
is, every man believes that he has a greater pos- 
sibility. 

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day 
I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. 
I see no reason why I should not have the same 
thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. 
What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most nat- 
ural thing in the world ; but yesterday I saw a dreary 
vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much ; 
and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who 
he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas 
for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast 
ebb of a vast flow ! I am God in nature ; I am a 
weed by the wall. 

The continual effort to raise himself above him- 
self, to work a pitch above his last height, betrajs it- 
self in a man’s relations. We thirst for approbation, 
yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of na- 
ture is love ; yet, if I have a friend, I am tormented. 


CIRCLES. 


279 


by my imperfections. The love of me accuses the 
other party. If he were high enough to slight me, 
then could I love him, and rise by my affection to 
new heights. A man’s growth is seen in the succes- 
sive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom 
he loses for truth, he gains a better. I thought, as 
I walked in the woods and mused on my friends, 
why should I play with them this game of idolatry ? 
I know and see too well, when not voluntarily 
blind, the speedy limits of persons called high 
and worthy. Rich, noble, and great they are 
by the liberality of our speech, but truth is sad. 
O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they 
are not thou ! Every personal consideration that 
we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the 
thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleas- 
ure. 

How often must we learn this lesson ? Men 
cease to interest us when we find their limitations. 
The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once 
come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with 
him. Has he talents ? has he enterprise ? has he 
knowledge ? it boots not. Infinitely alluring and 
attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, 
a sea to swim in ; now, you have found his shores, 
found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it 
again. 

Each new step we take in thought reconciles 


280 


ESSAV X. 


twenty seemingly discordant facts, as expressions of 
one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the re 
spe olive heads of two schools. A wise man will see 
that Aristotle Platonizes. By going one step farther 
back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled, 
by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, 
and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still 
higher vision. 

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker 
on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as 
when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, 
and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. 
There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be 
turned to-morrow ; there is not any literary reputa- 
tion, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that 
may not be revised and condemned. The very 
hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the re- 
ligion of nations, the manners and morals of man- 
kind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization. 
Generalization is always a new influx of the di- 
vinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that at- 
tends it. 

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so 
that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be 
out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. 
This can only be by his preferring truth to his past 
apprehension of truth ; and his alert acceptance of 
tt, from whatever quarter ; the intrepid conviction 


CIRCLES. 


281 


that his laws, his relations to society, his Christian- 
ity, his world, may at any time be superseded and 
decease. 

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to 
play with it academically, as the magnet was once a 
toy . Then we see in the heyday of youth and poet- 
ry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and 
fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stem and 
grand, and we see that it must be true. It now 
shows itself ethical and practical. We learn that 
God is ; that he is in me ; and that all things are 
shadows of him. The idealism of Berkeley is only 
a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that 
again is a crude statement of the fact, that all nature 
is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organ 
izing itself. Much more obviously is history and the 
state of the world at any one time directly depend- 
ent on the intellectual classification then existing in 
the minds of men. The things which are dear to 
men at this hour are so on account of the ideas 
which have emerged on their mental horizon, and 
which cause the present order of things as a tree 
bears its apples. A new degree of culture would 
instantly revolutionize the entire system of human 
pursuits. 

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversa- 
tion we pluck up the termini which bound the com- 
mon of silence on every side. The parties are not 


282 


ESSAY X. 


to be judged by the spirit they partake and even ex* 
press under this Pentecost. To-morrow they wili 
have receded from this high-water mark. To-mor- 
row you shall find them stooping under the old pack- 
saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it 
glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes 
a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of 
the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and 
exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to 
another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to 
become men. O, what truths profound and executa- 
ble only in ages and orbs are supposed in the an- 
nouncement of every truth ! In common hours, so- 
ciety sits cold and statuesque. We all stand wait- 
ing, empty, — knowing, possibly, that we can be 
full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are no* 
symbols to us, hut prose and trivial toys. Then 
cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery 
men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil 
which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the 
very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock 
and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so 
large in the fogs of yesterday, — property, climate, 
breeding, personal beauty, and the like, have strange- 
ly changed their proportions. All that we reck- 
oned settled shakes and rattles ; and literatures, cit- 
ies, climates, religions, leave their foundations, and 
dance before our eyes. And yet here again see the 


CIRCLES. 


283 


swift circumspection ! Good as is discourse, silence 
is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse 
indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker 
and the hearer. If they were at a perfect under- 
standing n any part, no words would be necessary 
thereoa If at one in all parts, no words would be 
suffered. 

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal cir- 
cle, through which a new one may be described. 
The use of literature is to afford us a platform 
whence we may command a view of our present 
life, a purchase by which we may move it. We 
fill ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves 
the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman hous- 
es, only that we may wiselier see French, English, 
and American houses and modes of living. In like 
manner, we see literature best from the midst of wild 
nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high re- 
ligion. The field cannot be well seen from within 
the field. The astronomer must have his diameter 
of the earth’s orbit as a base to find the parallax of 
any star. 

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument 
and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the 
treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but 
in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline 
to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in reme- 
dial force, in the power ol change and reform. But 


284 


ESSAY X. 


some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine 
of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk ro' 
mance, full of daring thought and action. He smites 
and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my 
whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my 
own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all 
the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable 
once more of choosing a straight path in theory and 
practice. 

We have the same need to command a view of the 
religion of the world. We can never see Christian- 
ity from the catechism : — from the pastures, from a 
boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood- 
birds, we possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental 
light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms 
which the field offers us, we may chance to cast a 
right glance back upon biography. Christianity is 
rightly dear to the best of mankind ; yet was there 
never a young philosopher whose breeding had fallen 
into the Christian church, by whom that brave text 
of Paul’s was not specially prized : — u Then shall 
also the Son be subject unto Him who put all things 
under him, that God may be all in all.” Let the 
claims and virtues of persons be never so great and 
welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward 
to the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms it« 
self against the dogmatism of bigots with this gener- 
ous word out of the book itself. 


CIRCLES. 


285 


The natural world may be conceived of as a sys- 
tem of concentric circles, and we now and then de- 
tect in nature slight dislocations, which apprize us that 
this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, hut 
sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this 
themistry and vegetation, these metals and animals, 
which seem to stand there for their own sake, are 
means and methods only, — are words of God, and 
as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or 
chemist learned his craft, who has explored the grav- 
ity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not 
yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a 
partial or approximate statement, namely, that like 
draws to like ; and that the goods which belong to 
you gravitate to you, and need not be pursued with 
pains and cost ? Yet is that statement approximate 
also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. 
Not through subtle, subterranean channels need friend 
and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly 
considered, these things proceed from the eternal 
generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two 
sides of one fact. 

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that 
we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light 
of a better. The great man will not be prudent in 
the popular sense ; all his prudence will be so much 
deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each 
to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god he 


286 


ESSAY X. 


devotes it ; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be 
prudent still ; if to a great trust, he can well spare 
his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot in- 
stead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through 
the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite 
of snakes ; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In 
many years neither is harmed by such an accident. 
Yet it seems to me, that, with every precaution you 
take against such an evil, you put yourself into the 
power of the evil. I suppose that the highest pru- 
dence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a 
rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit ? 
Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful 
calculations before we take up our rest in the great 
sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new cen- 
tre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar 
to the humblest men. The poor and the low have 
their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy 
as well as you. “ Blessed be nothing,” and “the 
worse things are, the better they are,” are prov- 
erbs which express the transcendentalism of common 
life. 

One man’s justice is another’s injustice ; one 
man’s beauty, another’s ugliness ; one man’s wisdom, 
another’s folly ; as one beholds the same objects from 
a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in 
paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence 
of another who is very remiss in this duty, and makes 


CIRCLES. 


287 


the creditor wait tediously. But that second man 
has his own way of looking at things ; asks himself 
which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or 
the debt to the poor ? the debt of money, or the 
debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature ? 
F or you, O broker ! there is no other principle but 
arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import ; 
love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, 
these are sacred ; nor can I detach one duty, like 
you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces 
mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me 
live onward ; you shall find that, though slower, the 
progress of my character will liquidate all these 
debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man 
should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, 
would not this be injustice ? Does he owe no debt 
but money ? And are all claims on him to be post- 
poned to a landlord’s or a banker’s ? 

There is no virtue which is final ; all are initial. 
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The 
terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast 
away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed 
such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser 
vices. 

“ Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too, 

Those smaller faults, half converts to the right." 

It is the highest power of divine moments that 
they abolish our contritions also. I accuse ipy^lf 


ESSAY X. 


288 

of sloth and unprofitableness day by day ; but when 
these waves of God flow into me, I no longer reckon 
lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible 
achievement by what remains to me of the month 
or the year ; for these moments confer a sort of 
omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing 
of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind 
is commensurate with the work to be done, without 
time. 

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some 
reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyr- 
rhonism, at an equivalence and indiflerency of all 
actions, and would fain teach us that, if ice are 
true , forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones 
out of which we shall construct the temple of the 
true God ! 

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am 
gladdened by seeing the predominance of the saccha 
rine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not 
less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inun- 
dation of the principle of good into every chink 
and hole that selfishness has left open, yea, into 
selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, 
nor hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. 
But lest I should mislead any when I have my 
own head and obey my whims, let me remind 
the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do 
not set the least value on what I do, or the least 


CIRCLES. 


289 


discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to set- 
tle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. 
No facts are to me sacred ; none are profane ; I 
simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past 
at my back. 

Yet this incessant movement and progression which 
all things partake could never become sensible to us 
but by contrast to some principle of fixture or 
stability ii. the soul. Whilst the eternal genera- 
tion of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. 
That central life is somewhat superior to creation, 
superior to knowledge and thought, and contains 
all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life 
and thought as large and excellent as itself ; but in 
vain ; for that which is made instructs how to make 
a better. 

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, 
but all things renew, germinate, and spring. Why 
should we import rags and relics into the new hour ? 
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only 
disease ; all others run into this one. We call it by 
many names, — fever, intemperance, insanity, stupid- 
ity, and crime; they are all forms of old age; they 
are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not new- 
ness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. 
I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what 
is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. 
Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious 
19 


290 


ESSAY X. 


eye looking upward, counts itself nothing, and aban* 
dons itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. 
But the man and woman of seventy assume to know 
all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspi- 
ration, accept the actual for the necessary, and talk 
down to the young. Let them, then, become organs 
of the Holy Ghost ; let them be lovers ; let them be- 
hold truth ; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles 
smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and 
power. This old age ought not to creep on a hu- 
man mind. In nature every moment is new ; the 
past is always swallowed and forgotten ; the coming 
only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, 
the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath 
or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No 
truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in 
the light of new thoughts. People wish to be set- 
tled ; only as far as they are unsettled is there any 
hope for them. 

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess 
to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to- 
morrow, when we are building up our being. Of 
lower states, — of acts of routine and sense, — we can 
tell somewhat; but the masterpieces of God, the total 
growths and universal movements of the soul, he 
liideth ; they are incalculable. I can know that 
truth is divine and helpful ; but how it shall help me 
I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of 


CIRCLES. 


291 


so to know. The new position of the advancing man 
has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. 
It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, 
yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast 
away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowl- 
edge, as vacant and vain. Now, for the first time, 
seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest 
words, — we do not know what they mean, except 
when we love and aspire. 

The difference between talents and character is 
adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and 
power and courage to make a new road to new and 
better goals. Character makes an overpowering 
present ; a cheerful, determined hour, which fortifies 
all the company, by making them see that much is 
possible and excellent that was not thought of. 
Character dulls the impression of particular events. 
When we see the conqueror, we do not think much 
of any one battle or success. We see that we had 
exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. 
The great man is not convulsible or tormentable ; 
events pass over him without much impression. Peo* 
pie say sometimes, ‘ See what I have overcome ; 
see how cheerful I am ; see how completely I have 
triumphed over these black events.’ Not if they 
still remind me of the black event. True conquest 
is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear, as 
an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so 
large and advancing. 


292 


ESSAY X. 


The one thing which we seek with insatiable de 
sire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of oui 
propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do 
something without knowing how or why ; in short, to 
draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved 
without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful : 
it is by abandonment. The great moments of histo- 
ry are the facilities of performance through the 
strength of ideas, as the works of genius and re- 
ligion. u A man,” said Oliver Cromwell, u never 
rises so high as when he knows not whither he is go- 
ing.” Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium 
and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of 
this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous at- 
traction for men. For the like reason, they ask the 
aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in 
some manner these flames and generosities of the 
heart. 


INTELLECT. 


Go, speed the stars of Thought 
On to their shining goals ; — 

The sower scatters broad his seed 
The wheat thou strew’st be souls. 



ESSAY XI. 


INTELLECT 


Every substance is negatively electric to that 
wnich stands above it in the chemical tables, posi- 
tively to that which stands below it. Water dis- 
solves wood, and iron, and salt ; air dissolves water ; 
electric fire dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves 
fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed 
relations of nature, in its resistless menstruum. Intel- 
lect lies behind genius, which is intellect constructive. 
Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or 
construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees 
a natural history of the intellect, but what man has 
yet been able to mark the steps and boundaries of 
that transparent essence ? The first questions are 
always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is grav- 
elled by the inquisitiveness of a child. How can we 
speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, 
as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and 
so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowl- 


296 


ESSAY XI. 


edge into act ? Each becomes the other. Itself 
alone is. Its vision is not like the vision of the eye. 
but is union with the things known. 

Intellect and intellection signify to the common car 
consideration of abstract truth. The considerations 
of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt, 
tyrannize over most men’s minds. Intellect sep- 
arates the fact considered from you , from all local 
and personal reference, and discerns it as if it exist- 
ed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the 
iffections as dense and colored mists. In the fog of 
good and evil affections, it is hard for man to walk 
forward in a straight line. Intellect is void of affec- 
tion, and sees an object as it stands in the light of 
science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out 
of the individual, floats over its own personality, and 
regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine. He who 
is immersed in what concerns person or place can 
not see the problem of existence. This the intel- 
lect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed 
and bound. The intellect pierces the form, over- 
leaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between re- 
mote things, and reduces all things into a few jdn- 
ciples. 

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. 
All that mass of mental and moral phenomena, which 
we do not make objects of voluntary thought, come 
within the power of fortune ; they constitute the cir- 


INTELLECT. 


297 


cumstance of daily life ; they are subject to change, 
to fear, and hope. Every man beholds his human 
condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship 
iground is battered by the waves, so man, impris- 
oned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming 
events. But a truth, separated by the intellect, is 
no longer a subject of destiny. We behold it as a 
god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact 
in our life, or any record of our fancies or reflec- 
tions, disentangled from the web of our unconscious- 
ness, becomes an object impersonal and immortal. 
It is the past restored, but embalmed. A better art 
than that of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out 
of it. It is eviscerated of care. It is offered for 
science. What is addressed to us for contemplation 
does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual be- 
ings. 

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every 
expansion. The mind that grows could not predict 
the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. 
God enters by a private door into every individual. 
Long prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of 
the mind. Out of darkness, it came insensibly into 
the marvellous light of to-day. In the period of in- 
fancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from 
the surrounding creation after its own way. What- 
ever any mind doth or saith is after a law ; and 
this native law remains over it after it has come to 


298 


ESSAY XI. 


reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, 
pedantic, introverted self-tormenter’s life, the great- 
est part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimagina- 
ble, and must be, until he can take himself up by his 
own ears. What am I ? What has my will done to 
make me that I am ? Nothing. I have been floated 
into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, 
by secret currents of might and mind, and my in- 
genuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not 
aided to an appreciable degree. 

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You 
cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come 
so close to any question as your spontaneous glance 
shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or 
walk abroad in the morning after meditating the mat- 
ter before sleep on the previous night. Our think- 
ing is a pious reception. Our truth of thought is 
therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction 
given by our will, as by too great negligence. We 
do not determine what we will think. We only open 
our senses, clear away, as we can, all obstruction 
from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We 
have little control over our thoughts. We are the 
prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments 
into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take 
no thought for the morrow, gaze like children, with- 
out an effort to make them our own. By and by we 
r all out of that rapture, bethink us where we have 


INTELLECT. 


299 


oeen, what we have seen, and repeat, as truly as we 
can, what we have beheld. As far as we can recah 
these ecstasies, we carry away in the ineffaceable 
memory the result, and all men and all the ages con- 
firm it. It is called Truth. But the moment we 
cease to report, and attempt to correct and contrive, 
t is not truth. 

If we consider what persons have stimulated and 
profited us, we shall perceive the superiority of the 
spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arithmeti- 
cal or logical. The first contains the second, but 
virtual and latent. We want, in every man, a long 
logic ; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it 
must not be spoken. Logic is the procession or 
proportionate unfolding of the intuition ; but its vir- 
tue is as silent method ; the moment it would appear 
as propositions, and have a separate value, it is 
worthless. 

In every man’s mind, some images, words, and 
facts remain, without effort on his part to imprint 
them, which others forget, and afterwards these illus- 
trate to him important laws. All our progress is an 
unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an 
instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the 
plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to 
the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain 
to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen 
into truth, and you shall know why you believe. 


300 


ESSAY XI. 


Each mind has its own method. A true man never 
acquires after college rules What you have aggre- 
gated in a natural manner surprises and delights when 
it is produced. For we cannot oversee each other’s 
secret. And hence the differences between men in 
natural endowment are insignificant in comparison 
with their common wealth. Do you think the porter 
and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no 
wonders for you ? Every body knows as much as 
the savant. The walls of rude minds are scrawled 
all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one 
day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every 
man, in the degree in which he has wit and culture, 
finds his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of 
living and thinking of other men, and especially of 
those classes whose minds have not been subdued by 
the drill of school education. 

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy 
mind, but becomes richer and more frequent in its 
informations through all states of culture. At last 
comes the era of reflection, when we not only ob- 
serve, but take pains to observe ; when we of set 
purpose sit down to consider an abstract truth ; when 
we keep the mind’s eye open, whilst we converse, 
whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the 
secret law of some class of facts. 

What is the hardest task in the world ? To think. 
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye 


INTELLECT. 


301 


an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and with- 
draw on this side and on that. I seem to know what 
he meant who said, No man can see God face to 
face and live. For example, a man explores the 
oasis of civil government. Let him intend his mind 
without respite, without rest, in one direction. His 
best heed long time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts 
are flitting before him. We all but apprehend, we 
dimly forebode the truth. We say, I will walk abroad, 
and the truth will take form and clearness to me. 
We go forth, but cannot find it. It seems as if we 
needed only the stillness and composed attitude of the 
library to seize the thought. But we come in, and 
are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, 
and unannounced, the truth appears. A certain, 
wandering light appears^ and is the distinction, the 
principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes, because 
we had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems 
as if the law of the intellect resembled that law of 
nature by which we now inspire, now expire the 
breath ; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls 
out the blood, — the law of undulation. So now 
you must labor with your brains, and now you must 
forbear your activity, and see what the great Soul 
showeth. 

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached 
trom the intellections as from the moral volitions. 
Every intellection *s mainly prospective. Its pres- 


302 


ESSAY XI. 


ent value is its least. Inspect what delights you ii* 
Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth 
that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full 
on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, 
and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had lit- 
tered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact 
in his private biography becomes an illustration of this 
new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men 
by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where 
did he get this ? and think there was something divine 
in his life. But no ; they have myriads of facts just 
as good, would they only get a lamp to ransack their 
attics withal. 

We are all wise. The difference between per- 
sons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an aca- 
demical club, a person who always deferred to me, 
who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my ex- 
periences had somewhat superior ; whilst I saw that 
his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to 
me, and I would make the same use of them. He 
held the old ; he holds the new ; I had the habit of 
tacking together the old and the new, which he did 
not use to exercise. This may hold in the great ex- 
amples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare, we 
should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no: 
but of a great equality, — only that he possessed a 
strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts, which 
we lacked. For, notwithstanding our utter inca- 


INTELLECT. 


303 


pacity to produce any thing like Hamlet and Othello, 
see the perfect reception this wit, and immense 
knowledge of life, and liquid eloquence find in us all. 

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, 
or hoe corn, and then retire within doors, and shut 
your eyes, and press them with your hand, you shall 
still see apples hanging in the bright light, with boughs 
and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn- 
flags, and this for five or six hours afterwards. There 
lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you 
knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural im- 
ages with which your life has made you acquainted 
in your memory, though you know it not, and a thrill 
of passion flashes light on their dark chamber, and 
the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as the 
word of its momentary thought. 

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. 
Our history, we are sure, is quite tame : we have 
nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser 
years still run back to the despised recollections of 
childhood, and always we are fishing up some won- 
derful article out of that pond ; until, by and by, we 
begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish 
person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the 
miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the 
Universal History. 

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly 
designate by the word Genius, we observe the same 


301 


ESSAY XI. 


balance of two elements as in intellect receptive. 
The constructive intellect produces thoughts, senten- 
ces, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the gener- 
ation of the mind, the marriage of thought with na- 
ture. To genius must always go two gifts, the thought 
and the publication. The first is revelation, always 
a miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or in- 
cessant study can ever familiarize, but which must 
always leave the inquirer stupid with wonder. It is 
the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought 
now, for the first time, bursting into the universe, a 
child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genuine and 
immeasurable greatness. It seems, for the time, to 
inherit all that has yet existed, and to dictate to the 
unborn. It affects every thought of man, and goes 
to fashion every institution. But to make it availa- 
ble, it needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed 
to men. To be communicable, it must become pic- 
ture or sensible object. We must learn the language 
of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with 
their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the 
senses. The ray of light passes invisible through 
space, and only when it falls on an object is it seen. 
When the spiritual energy is directed on something 
outward, then it is a thought. The relation between 
‘t and you first makes you, the value of you, appar- 
ent to me. The rich, inventive genius of the painter 
must be smothered and lost for want of the power of 


INTELLECT. 


305 


drawing, and in our happy hours we should be inex 
haustible poets, if once we could break through the 
silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some 
access to primary truth, so all have some art or pow- 
er of communication in their head, but only in the 
artist does it descend into the hand. There is an in- 
equality, whose laws we do not yet know, between 
twq men and between two moments of the same man, 
in respect to this faculty. In common hours, we 
have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, 
but they do not sit for their portraits ; tjiey are not de- 
tached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius is 
spontaneous ; but the power of picture or expres- 
sion, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies 
a mixture of will, a certain control over the spontane- 
ous states, without which no production is possible. 
It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of 
thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenu- 
ous exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative 
vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does 
not flow from experience only or mainly, but from a 
richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of 
particular forms are the grand strokes of the painter 
executed, but by repairing to the fountain-head of all 
forms in his mind. Who is the first drawing-master ? 
Without instruction we know very well the ideal of 
the human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg 
be distorted in a picture, if the attitude be natural or 
2C 


306 


ESSAY XI. 


grand, or mean, though he has never received any in- 
struction in drawing, or heard any conversation on 
the subject, nor can himself draw with correctness a 
single feature. A good form strikes all eyes pleas- 
antly, long before they have any science on the sub- 
ject, and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpita- 
tion, prior to all consideration of the mechanical pro^ 
portions of the features and head. We may owe to 
dreams some light on the fountain of this skill ; for, 
as soon as we let our will go, and let the unconscious 
states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are ! 
We entertain ourselves with wonderful forms of men, 
of women, of animals, of gardens, of woods, and of 
monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we then 
draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no mea- 
greness or poverty ; it can design well, and group 
well ; its composition is full of art, its colors are well 
laid on, and the whole canvas which it paints is life- 
like, and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, 
with desire, and with grief. Neither are the artist’s 
copies from experience ever mere copies, but al- 
ways touched and softened by tints from this ideal 
domain. 

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do 
not appear to be so often combined but that a good 
sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for a 
long time. Yet when we write with ease, and come 
wit into the free air of thought, we seem to be as- 


INTELLECT. 


307 


sured that nothing is easier than to continue this com- 
munication at pleasure. Up, down, around, the king- 
dom of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse 
makes us free of her city. Well, the world has a 
million writers. One would think, then, that good 
thought would be as familiar as air and water, and 
the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. 
Yet we can count all our good books ; nay, 1 remem- 
ber any beautiful verse for twenty years. It is true 
that the discerning intellect of the world is always 
much in advance of the creative, so that there are 
many competent judges of the best book, and few 
writers of the best books. But some of the condi- 
tions of intellectual construction are of rare occur- 
rence. The intellect is a whole, and demands in- 
tegrity in every work. This is resisted equally by a 
man’s devotion to a single thought, and by his ambi- 
tion to combine too many. 

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten 
his attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply 
himself to that alone for a long time, the truth be- 
comes distorted and not itself, but falsehood ; herein 
resembling the air, which is our natural element, and 
the breath of our nostrils, but if a stream of the same 
be directed on the body for a time, it causes cold, 
fever, and even death. How wearisome the gram- 
marian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fa- 
natic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance 


308 


ESSAY XI. 


is lost by tne exaggeration of a single topic. It is 
incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison aiso 
I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up 
by a strong wind, and blown so far in one direction 
that I am out of the hoop of your horizon. 

Is it any better, if the student, to avoid this offence, 
and to liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical 
whole of history, or science, or philosophy, by a 
numerical addition of all the facts that fall within his 
vision ? The world refuses to be analyzed by addi- 
tion and subtraction. When we are young, we spend 
much time and pains in filling our note-books with 
all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, 
Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, 
we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the 
net value of all the theories at which the world has 
yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no 
completeness, and at last we discover that our curve 
is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet. 

Neither by detachment, neither by aggregation, is 
the integrity of the intellect transmitted to its works, 
but by a vigilance which brings the intellect in its 
greatness and best state to operate every moment. 
It must have the same wholeness which nature has. 
Although no diligence can rebuild the universe in a 
model, by the best accumulation or disposition of de- 
tails, yet does the world reappear in miniature in 
every event, so that all the laws of nature may be 


INTELLECT. 


309 


read in the smallest fact. The intellect must have 
the like perfection in its apprehension and in its 
works. For this reason, an index or mercury of 
intellectual proficiency is the perception of identity 
We talk with accomplished persons who appear to 
be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the 
turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them : 
the world is only their lodging and table. But the 
poet, whose verses are to be spheral and complete, 
is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face 
of strangeness she may put on. He feels a strict 
;onsanguinity, and detects more likeness than variety 
n all her changes. We are stung by the desire for 
new thought ; but when we receive a new thought, it 
is only the old thought with a new face, and though 
we make it our own, we instantly crave another ; we 
are not really enriched. For the truth was in us 
before it was reflected to us from natural objects ; 
and the profound genius will cast the likeness of all 
creatures into every product of his wit. 

But if the constructive powers are rare, and it is 
given to few men to be poets, yet every man is a re- 
ceiver of this descending holy ghost, and may well 
study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the 
whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral 
duty. A self-denial, no less austere than the saint’s, 
is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, 
and forego all things for that, and choose defeat and 


310 


ESSAY XI. 


pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby aug 
mented. 

God offers to every mind its choice between truth 
and repose. Take which you please, — you can 
never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, 
man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose pre- 
dominates will accept the first creed, the first philos- 
ophy, the first political party he meets, — most like- 
ly his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and repu- 
tation ; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom 
the love of truth predominates will keep himself 
aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain 
from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite nega- 
tions, between which, as walls, his being is swung. 
He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and im- 
perfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as 
the other is not, and respects the highest law of his 
being. 

The circle of the green earth he must measure 
with his shoes, to find the man who can yield him 
truth. He shall then know that there is somewhat 
more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. 
Happy is the hearing man ; unhappy the speaking 
man. As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a 
beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits 
to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that 
I hear and see. The waters of the great deep have 
ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I de- 


INTELLECT. 


311 


fine, I confine, and am less. When Socrates speaks, 
Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that 
they do not speak. They also are good. He like- 
wise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. 
Because a true and natural man contains and is the 
same truth which an eloquent man articulates : but in 
the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, it 
seems something the less to reside, and he turns to 
these silent beautiful with the more inclination and 
respect. The ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, 
for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent that destroys 
personality, and gives us leave to be great and uni- 
versal. Every man’s progress is through a succes- 
sion of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to 
have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place 
to a new. Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus 
says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and fol- 
low me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is 
as true intellectually as morally. Each new mind 
we approach seems to require an abdication of all 
our past and present possessions. A new doctrine 
seems, at first, a subversion of all our opinions, tastes, 
and manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such 
has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his 
interpreter Cousin, seemed to many young men in this 
country. Take thankfully and heartily all they can 
give. Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them 
not go until their blessing be won, and, after a shorf 


312 


ESSAY XI. 


season, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of in- 
fluence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an 
alarming meteor, but one more bright star shining se- 
renely in your heaven, and blending its light with all 
your day. 

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that 
which draws him, because that is his own, he is to 
refuse himself to that which draws him not, whatso- 
ever fame and authority may attend it, because it is 
not his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the in- 
tellect. One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a 
capillary column of water is a balance for the sea. 
It must treat things, and books, and sovereign genius, 
as itself also a sovereign. If iEschylus be that man 
he is taken for, he has not yet done his office, when 
he has educated the learned of Europe for a thousand 
years. He is now to approve himself a master of 
delight to me also. If he cannot do that, all his 
fame shall avail him nothing with me. I were a fool 
not to sacrifice a thousand iEschyluses to my intel- 
lectual integrity. Especially take the same ground 
in regard to abstract truth, the science of the mind. 
The Bacon, the Spinoza, the Hume, Schelliig, 
Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of 
the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator 
of things in your consciousness, which you have also 
your way of seeing, perhaps of denominating. Say, 
then, instead of too timidly poring into his obseuro 


INTELLECT. 


313 


sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering back to 
you your consciousness. He has not succeeded ; 
now let another try. If Plato cannot, perhaps Spi- 
noza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant. 
Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is 
no recondite, but a simple, natural, common state, 
which the writer restores to you. 

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though 
the subject might provoke it, speak to the open ques- 
tion between Truth and Love. I shall not presume 
to interfere in the old politics of the skies — “ The 
cherubim know most; the seraphim love most.” 
The gods shall settle their own quarrels. But I can- 
not recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, 
without remembering that lofty and sequestered class 
who have been its prophets and oracles, the high- 
priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti , the 
expounders of the principles of thought from age 
to age. When, at long intervals, we turn over their 
abstruse pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand 
air of these few, these great spiritual lords, who have 
walked in the world, — these of the old religion, — 
dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of 
Christianity look par venues and popular ; for ‘‘persua- 
sion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect.” This 
band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, 
Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius, 
and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so 


314 


ESSAY XI. 


primary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent tc 
all the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and literature, 
and to be at once poetry, and music, and dancing, 
and astronomy, and mathematics. I am present at 
the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geom- 
etry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foundations of 
nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is 
proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands 
the entire schedule and inventory of thing, for its 
illustration. But what marks its elevation, *nd has 
even a comic look to us, is the innocent serenity with 
which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their clouds, and 
from age to age prattle to each other, and to no con- 
temporary. Well assured that their speech is intelli- 
gible, and the most natural thing in the world, they 
add thesis to thesis, without a moment’s heed of the 
universal astonishment of the human race below, who 
do not comprehend their plainest argument ; nor do 
they ever relent so much as to insert a popular or ex- 
plaining sentence ; nor testify the least displeasure or 
petulance at the dulness of their amazed auditory. 
The angels are so enamoured of the language that is 
spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips 
with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but 
speak their own, whether there be any who under* 
stand it or not. 


ART 


Give to barrows, trays, and pans 
Grace and glimmer of romance , 
Bring the moonlight into noon 
Hid in gleaming piles of stone ; 

On the city’s paved street 
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet, 
Let spouting fountains cool the air, 
Singing in the sun-baked square * 

Let statue, picture, park, and hall, 
Ballad, flag, and festival, 

The past restore, the day adorn, 

And make each morrow a new mont. 
So shall the drudge in dusty frock 
Spy behind the city clock 
Retinues of airy kings, 

Skirts of angels, starry wings, 

His fathers shining in bright fables, 
His children fed at heavenly tables. 

’T is the privilege of Art 
Thus to play its cheerful part, 

Man in Earth to acclimate, 

And bend the exile to his fate, 

And, moulded of one element 
With the days and firmament, 

Teach him on these as stairs to climb) 
And live on even terms with Timej 
Whilst upper life the slender rill 
Of human sense doth overfill. 



ESSAY XII. 


ART. 


Because the soul is progressive, *t never quite 
repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production 
of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works 
both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ 
the popular distinction of works according to their 
aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, 
not imitation, but creation, is the aim. In landscapes, 
the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer cre- 
ation than we know. The details, the prose of na- 
ture he should omit, and give us only the spirit and 
splendor. He should know that the landscape has 
beauty for his eye, because it expresses a thought 
which is to him good ; and this, because the same 
power which sees through his eyes is seen in that 
spectacle ; and he will come to value the expression 
of nature, and not nature itself, and so exalt in his 
copy the features that please him. He will give the 
gloom oi gloom, and the sunshine of sunshine. In 


318 


ESSAY XII. 


a portrait, he must inscribe the character, and not 
the features, and must esteem the man who sits to 
him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness 
of the aspiring original within. 

What is that abridgment and selection we observe 
in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative im- 
pulse ? for it is the inlet of that higher illumination 
which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler 
symbols What is a man but nature’s finer success 
in self-explication ? What is a man but a finer and 
compacter landscape than the horizon figures, — na- 
ture’s eclecticism ? and what is his speech, his love 
of painting, love of nature, but a still finer success ? 
all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk left 
out, and the spirit or moral of it contracted into 
a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the 
pencil ? 

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in 
his day and nation, to convey his enlarged sense to 
his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always form- 
ed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets 
his ineffaceable seal on the work, and gives it an in- 
expressible charm for the imagination. As far as 
the spiritual character of the period overpowers the 
artist, and finds expression in his work, so far it will 
retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future 
beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. 
No man can quite exclude this element of Necessity 


ART. 


819 


from his labor. No man can quite emancipate him- 
self from his age and country, or produce a model in 
which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, 
and arts, of his times shall have no share. Though 
he were never so original, never so wilful and fantas- 
tic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the 
thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance 
betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will, and 
out of his sight, he is necessitated, by the air he 
breathes, and the idea on which he and his contem- 
poraries live and toil, to share the manner of his 
times, without knowing what that manner is. Now 
that which is inevitable in the work has a higher charm 
than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the 
artist’s pen or chisel seems to have been held and 
guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the 
history of the human race. This circumstance gives 
a value to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, 
Chinese, and Mexican idols, however gross and shape- 
less. They denote the height of the human soul in 
that hour, and were not fantastic, but sprung from a 
necessity as deep as the world. Shall I now add, 
that the whole extant product of the plastic arts has 
herein its highest value, as history ; as a stroke drawn 
in the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful, ac- 
cording to whose ordinations all beings advance to 
their beatitude ? 

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office 


320 


ESSAY XII. 


of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are 
immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. 
It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist 
and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or 
we behold what is carved and painted, as students of 
the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in de- 
tachment, in sequestering one object from the embar- 
rassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the 
connection of things, there can be enjoyment, con- 
templation, but no thought. Our happiness and un- 
happiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a 
pleasing trance, but his individual character and his 
practical power depend on his daily progress in the 
separation of things, and dealing with one at a time. 
Love and all the passions concentrate all existence 
around a single form. It is the habit of certain minds 
to give an all-excluding fulness to the object, the 
thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make 
that for the time the deputy of the world. These 
are the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. 
The power to detach, and to magnify by detaching, is 
the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and 
the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the mo- 
mentary eminency of an object, — so remarkable in 
Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle, — the painter and sculp- 
tor exhibit in color and in stone. The power de- 
pends on the depth of the artist’s insight of that ob- 
ect he contemplates. For every object has its root3 


ART. 


321 


n central nature, and may of course be so exhibited 
to us as to represent the world. Therefore, each 
work of genius is the tyrant of the hour, and con- 
centrates attention on itself. For the time, it is the 
only thing worth naming to do that, — be it a son- 
net, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration, the 
plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a voyage of 
discovery. Presently we pass to some other object, 
which rounds itself into a whole, as did the first ; 
for example, a well-laid garden : and nothing seems 
worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I should 
think fire the best thing in the world, if I were not 
acquainted with air, and water, and earth. For it is 
the right and property of all natural objects, of all 
genuine talents, of all native properties whatsoever, 
to be for their moment the top of the world. A 
squirrel leaping from bough to bough, and making the 
wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye 
not less than a lion, — is beautiful, self-sufficing, and 
stands then and there for nature. A good ballad 
draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as 
an epic has done before. A dog, drawn by a mas- 
tet, or a litter of pigs, satisfies, and is a reality not 
less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this succes- 
sion of excellent objects, we learn at last the immen- 
sity of the world, the opulence of human nature, 
wh ch can run out to infinitude in any direction. 
Bit I also learn that what astonished and fascinated 
21 


322 


ESSAY XII. 


me in the first work astonished me in the second 
work also ; that excellence of all things is one. 

The office of painting and sculpture seems to he 
merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell us 
their last secret. The best pictures are rude draughts 
of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes 
which make up the ever-changing “ landscape with 
figures ” amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to 
be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When 
that has educated the frame to self-possession, to 
nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-master 
are better forgotten ; so painting teaches me the 
splendor of color and the expression of form, and, as 
I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I 
see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indiffer- 
ency in which the artist stands free to choose out of 
the possible forms. If he can draw every thing, why 
draw any thing ? and then is my eye opened to the 
eternal picture which nature paints in the street with 
moving men and children, beggars, and fine ladies, 
draped in red, and green, and blue, and gray ; long- 
haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, 
giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, — capped and based 
by heaven, earth, and sea. 

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the 
same lesson. As picture teaches the coloring, so 
sculpture the anatomy of form. When I have seen 
fine statues, and afterwards enter a public assembly 


ART. 


323 


F understand well what he meant who said, u When 
I have been reading Homer, all men look like giants.” 
I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics 
of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities 
ol its function. There is no statue like this living 
man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculp- 
ture, of perpetual variety. What a gallery of arl 
have I here ! No mannerist made these varied groups 
and diverse original single figures. Here is the artist 
himself improvising, grim and glad, at his block. 
Now one thought strikes him, now another, and with 
each moment he alters the whole air, attitude, and 
expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense 
of oil and easels, of marble and chisels : except to 
open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they 
are hypocritical rubbish. 

The reference of all production at last to an abo 
riginal Power explains the traits common to all works 
of the highest art, — that they are universally intel- 
ligible ; that they restore to us the simplest states of 
mind ; and are religious. Since what skill is therein 
shown is the reappearance of the original soul, a jet 
of pure light, it should produce a similar impression 
to that made by natural objects. In happy hours, 
nature appears to us one with art ; art perfected, — 
the work of genius. And the individual, in whom 
simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human 
influences overpower the accidents of a local and 


324 


ESSAY XII. 


special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we 
travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must 
carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty 
is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or 
rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from 
the work of art of human character, — a wonderful 
expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, 
of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, 
and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls 
which have these attributes. In the sculptures of the 
Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in the 
pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the 
highest charm is the universal language they speak. 
A confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and 
hope, breathes from them all. That which we carry 
to them, the same we bring back more fairly illus- 
trated in the memory. The traveller who visits the 
Vatican, and passes from chamber to chamber through 
galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi, and candela- 
bra, through all forms of beauty, cut in the richest 
materials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of 
the principles out of which they all sprung, and that 
they had their origin from thoughts and laws in his 
own breast. He studies the technical rules on these 
wonderful remains, but forgets that these works were 
not always thus constellated ; that they are the con 
tributions of many ages and many countries ; that 
each came out of the solitary workshop of one artist, 


ART. 


325 


who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the existence of 
other sculpture, created his work without other mod- 
el, save life, household life, and the sweet and smart 
of personal relations, of beating hearts, and meeting 
eyes, of poverty, and necessity, and hope, and fear. 
These were his inspirations, and these are the effects 
he carries home to your heart and mind. In propor- 
tion to his force, the artist will find in his work an 
outlet for his proper character. He must not be in 
any manner pinched or hindered by his material, but 
through his necessity of imparting himself the ada- 
mant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an ade- 
quate communication of himself, in his full stature and 
proportion. He need not cumber himself wdth a 
conventional nature and culture, nor ask what is the 
mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house, and 
weather, and manner of living which poverty and the 
fate of birth have made at once so odious and so 
dear, in the gray, unpainted wood cabin, on the cor- 
ner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the 
backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has 
endured the constraints and seeming of a city pover- 
ty, will serve as well as any other condition as the 
symbol of a thought which pours itself indifferently 
through all 

I remember, when in my younger days I had heard 
of the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great 
pictures would be great strangers ; some surprising 


32G 


ES‘ AY XII. 


combination of color and form ; a foreign wonder, 
barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and stand- 
ards of the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes 
and imaginations of school-boys. I was to see and 
acquire I knew not what. When I came at last to 
Rome, and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that 
genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and os- 
tentatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple 
and true ; that it was familiar and sincere ; that it 
was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many 
forms, — unto which I lived; that it was the plain 
you and me I knew so well, — had left at home in so 
many conversations. I had the same experience 
already i’ n a church at Naples. There I saw that 
nothing v changed with me but the place, and said 
to mysel — 4 Thou foolish child, hast thou come 
out hither, over four thousand miles of salt water, to 
find that which was perfect to thee there at home ? * 
— that fact I saw again in the Academmia at Naples, 
in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when I 
came to Rome, and to the paintings of Raphael, 
Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. 
“ What, old mole! workest thou in the earth so fast? ” 
It had travelled by my side : that which I fancied ] 
had left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and again 
at Milan, and at Paris, and made all travelling ridicu- 
lous as a treadmill. I now require this of all pictures, 
that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me 


ART. 


3*27 


Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing aston 
ishes men so much as common-sense and plain deal- 
ing. All great actions have been simple, and all 
great pictures are. 

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent 
example of this peculiar merit. A calm, benignant 
beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly 
to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name. 
The sweet and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, 
yet how it disappoints all florid expectations ! This 
familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance is as if 
one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture- 
dealers has its value, but listen not to their criticism 
when your heart is touched by genius. It was not 
painted for them, it was painted for you ; for such as 
had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and 
lofty emotions. 

Yet when we have said all our fine things about 
the arts, we must end with a frank confession, that 
the arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our best 
praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not 
to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of 
the resources of man, who believes that the best age 
of production is past. The real value of the Iliad, 
or the Transfiguration, is as signs of power ; billows 
or ripples they are of the stream of tendency ; to- 
kens of the everlasting effort to produce, which even 
in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art has not yet 


328 


ESSAY XII. 


come to its maturity, if it do not put itself abreast 
with the most potent influences of the world, if it is 
not practical and moral, if it do not stand in con 
nection with the conscience, if it do not make the 
poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with 
a voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for 
Art than the arts. They are abortive births of an 
imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the need to 
create ; but in its essence, immense and universal, it 
is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and 
of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures 
and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of 
man and nature is its end. A man should find in it 
an outlet for his whole energy. He may paint and 
carve only as long as he can do that. Art should 
exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance 
on every side, awakening in the beholder the same 
sense of universal relation and power which the work 
evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make 
new artists. 

Already History is old enough to witness the old 
age and disappearance of particular arts. The art of 
sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect. It 
was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a 
savage’s record of gratitude or devotion, and among 
a people possessed of a wonderful perception of form 
this childish carving was refined to the utmost splen- 
dor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and youth- 


AST, 


329 


ful people, and not the manly labor of a wise and 
spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree loaded witn 
leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, 1 
stand in a thoroughfare ; but in the works of our plas- 
tic arts, and especially of sculpture, creation is driv- 
en into a corner. I cannot hide from myself that 
there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys, 
and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature 
transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret 
we do not yet find. But the gallery stands at the 
mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it 
becomes frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton, 
with an attention habitually engaged on the paths of 
planets and suns, should have wondered what the Earl 
of Pembroke found to admire in u stone dolls.” 
Sculpture may serve to teach the pupil how deep is 
the secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate 
its meanings into that eloquent dialect. But the statue 
will look cold and false before that new activity winch 
needs to roll through all things, and is impatient of 
counterfeits, and things not alive. Picture and sculp- 
ture are the celebrations and festivities of form. But 
true art is never fixed, but always flowing. The 
sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human 
voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of ten- 
derness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has already 
lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the 
earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these 


330 


ESSAY XII. 


All works of art should not be detached, but extem- 
pore performances. A great man is a new statue in 
every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a 
picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Life 
may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a ro- 
mance. 

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a 
man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art 
up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its sepa- 
rate and contrasted existence. The fountains of in- 
vention and beauty in modern society are all but dried 
up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room 
makes us feel that we are all paupers in the alms- 
house of this world, without dignity, without skill, or 
industry. Art is as poor and low. The old tragic 
Necessity, which lowers on the brows even of the 
Venuses and the Cupids of tne antique, and furnishes 
the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous 
figures into nature, — namely, that they were inev- 
itable ; that the artist was drunk with a passion for 
form which he could not resist, and which vented it- 
self in these fine extravagances, — no longer dignifies 
the chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the con- 
noisseur now seek in art the exhibition of their talent, 
or an asylum from the evils of life. Men are not 
well pleased with the figure they make in their own 
imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their bet- 
ter sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art 


ART. 


331 


makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity 
makes ; namely, to detach the beautiful from the use- 
ful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, 
pass on to enjoyment. These solaces and compem 
sations, this division of beauty from use, the laws of 
nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is sought, 
not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it de 
grades the seeker. High beauty is no longer attaina 
ble by him in canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyri 
cal construction ; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beau 
ty, which is not beauty, is all that can be formed ; foi 
the hand can never execute any thing higher than the 
character can inspire. 

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. 
Art must not be a superficial talent, but must begin 
farther back in man. Now men do not see nature to 
be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall 
be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and incon- 
vertible, and console themselves with color-bags, and 
blocks of marble. They reject life as prosaic, and 
create a death which they call poetic. They despatch 
the day’s weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. 
They eat and drink, that they may afterwards execute 
the ideal. Thus is art vilified ; the name conveys 
to the mind its secondary and bad senses ; it stands 
in the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, 
and struck with death from the first. Would it not 
be better to begin higher up, — to serve the Ideal be* 


332 


ESSAY XII. 


fore they eat and drink ; to serve the ideal in eating 
and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the func- 
tions of life ? Beauty must come back to the useful 
arts, and the distinction between the fine and the use- 
ful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if 
life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or 
possible to distinguish the one from the other. In 
nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore 
beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive ; 
it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and 
fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legisla- 
ture, nor will it repeat in England or America its 
history in Greece. It will come, as always, unan- 
nounced, and spring up between the feet of brave 
and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for 
genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts ; it is 
its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and 
necessary facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop 
and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart it will 
raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, 
the joint-stock company, our law, our primary as- 
semblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the 
electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s retort, in 
which we seek now only an economical use. Is 
not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs 
to our great mechanical works, — to mills, railways, 
and machinery, — the effect of the mercenary im- 
pulses which these works obey ? When its errands 


ART. 


333 


are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the At- 
lantic between Old and New England, and arriving 
at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a 
step of man into harmony with nature. The boat 
at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by 
magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When 
science is learned in love, and its powers are wield- 
ed by love, they will appear the supplements and 
continuations of the material creation. 


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